


Following His Footsteps

by RandomOneShot



Category: Vampire Hunter D
Genre: Although you do not really NEED to have read them necessarily, And this poor kid is dead set on following them, BECAUSE HERE HE IS!, Based off the novels, Black Humor, D being himself, D is the world's worst brother, Exploits of a profession that mixes bounty hunting with assassination, He is SO NOT a nice person, He is not a nice person, Horror, Left Hand being himself, Poor humor, Science Fiction, So who remember's Tae's baby from the sixth novel?, Vampires, not the films, various supernatural creatures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:59:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 53,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7120345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RandomOneShot/pseuds/RandomOneShot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Traveling with the dhampir who may or may not be his brother, Dualarc learns that, with D, actions are louder than words. A series of connected one-shots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Found Him

**Author's Note:**

> So, I basically finished the sixth novel and then wondered what that kid would grow up like in the craptastic world of 12,000 A.D.

There was music in the night.

 

Not the music _of_ the night, which was to say the orchestra of howls, roars, snarls and yelps that were emitted from the various mutants and beasts that infested the frontier. While hardly a lullaby, there was a strangely invigorating element to their racket. It stirred a part of the human mind that had watched for danger since mankind first emerged from the trees and caves, a part that stood vigilant to this day. Those noises were constant reminders that there was always something seeking the flesh, the blood, the life of something else. The noises reminded anyone who listened to them that precious life was capable of being torn away at any moment. Whether consciously or not, the people who traveled the Frontier all incorporated those noises into their awareness. A change in them was a change in the environment, and that could be a dangerous thing.

 

Not that the young man on the mechanical horse’s back appeared to fear the monsters of the forest or their sounds.

 

Or _anything_ , for that matter.

 

The only color on him was the pale, pale white of his hands and face. A dark, wide-brimmed hat topped his long black hair and a black scarf was wound around his neck. A dark coat covered him from the shoulders down and a long sword, gently curved, was slung over his back.

 

But it was his face that would have drawn the most attention for it was sculpted with the kind of beauty that would drive the artist mad. There was no trace of femininity, of weakness, within his face, but it held a masculine beauty that would make even men blush. It was the kind of face a girl would see and then become lost to the world, choosing instead to dream forever of that one moment. Dark eyes, pale skin and a forehead of grace. Dazzling. Striking.

 

Inhuman.

 

Yeah, that was him all right.

 

Vampire Hunter D. Inhuman was the word, for sure.

 

Fuck, who _else_ could you hear the capitals in the title with? Vampire Hunter D - no lowercase letters, because he is just that amazing.

 

Mom was right.

 

I wonder if he remembers her.

 

Maybe I’ll ask him.

 

…Or maybe not, since he rode right past me without even a glance as to what some bum teenager is doing in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night, playing his flute.

 

Real cold.

 

She was right about that too, I guess.

 

I stopped playing and shove the instrument back into my bag. Picking it up, I swung it onto my shoulders and started after him. The horse would have left me behind sooner or later if I was a normal kid, but I’m not exactly normal anymore. As it was, I kept a steady twenty feet behind him the entire time. He never once looked back, although there was no way he didn’t know I was there.

 

So, I’m beneath your notice Mr. Hunter? Well, we’ll see.

 

* * *

  

He didn’t quit riding until four in the morning. I kid you not.

 

Bastard.

 

I was walking and keeping an eye open for any hungry monsters and wondering how I was going to talk to him and wondering what the hell I was going to do for food if there wasn’t a town nearby that catered to my special needs, because I only had enough plasma capsules left for maybe a week and then I was in trouble.

 

As it was, I nearly got a face full of horse butt before I realized he had stopped.

 

I not-quite-skidded to a halt, maybe four feet away from D and his mount. He was unpacking something from his saddlebags and, again, not giving me the slightest bit of attention. As far as he was concerned, I could have been another tree.

 

Well, I tell you, I had had enough of being scenery to that guy. I’d spent three months looking for him; the least he could do was acknowledge me. Then again, he didn’t exactly know that. And I didn’t plan on telling him if I could help it.

 

Still, as I was saying, I needed to talk to him.

 

First thing’s first, though. I was pretty sure this was the guy my mother had told me about, but there isn’t just one dhampir in the world and after three months of searching I didn’t want to settle for pretty sure.

 

“Excuse me?” I called.

 

He turned his head away from the saddlebag and looked at me for the first time. In that instant two very important things struck me like a pair of bricks to the head.

 

One – this was not a guy I ever, _ever_ wanted to piss off. He was giving me the kind of bored, unimpressed look I saw on my cat right before she gutted a rat that had the gall to squeak at her. If even half the stories I had heard about D were true, not only could he gut me in the time it took me to blink, but also he would not get even a drop of blood on him when he did it and my lifeless corpse hit the ground.

 

Two – he looked like me.

 

Sometime in-between stopping his horse and me calling out to him, he had taken off his hat. It had hidden a great deal more than I thought. Like how his nose came to a rather sharp point, same as mine. Like how his hair had a bit of a wave to it, same as mine. Like how I could look in a mirror and see his face, D’s own face, staring back at me. There were differences – my eye color, my ears, my overall expression (which did not read ‘uncaring frigid bastard’) – but they were small things.

 

I looked like D.

 

D looked like me.

 

And while the first realization sent chills down my neck, down my spine, to make my knees tremble a little, the second realization made an alarming number of things that my mother had told me, that I had heard her say to others, that I had dug out of her diaries after her funeral and that I had pieced together myself click into place like a puzzle.

 

Shit.

 

No wonder she had sent me to him.

 

“Yes?”

 

I blinked and snapped out of my funk. D was looking at me, waiting for me to finish speaking. How long had I been staring at him? This was not starting out well. I didn’t want him to think I was a stalker.

 

“I was wondering if your name is D?” I asked.

 

It was pointless. I was sure of his identity now.

 

I kind of sure on a few more things.

 

“Yes,” D said, and then went right back to fiddling with his gear.

 

Jerk.

 

Oh well. I’d found him, at last. As it was, I’d been walking more or less without stop for three days and I was tired. D, finally finishing with his search and pulling loose a bottle of something, didn’t seem to mind my presence. He was no longer looking at me, at any rate, and that made it easier to breathe.

 

I could talk to him more in the morning. Maybe. If he wasn’t so creepy and cold under the sunlight. I doubted it though.

 

I picked a tree that looked comfortable, curled up under it with my bag as a pillow and went to sleep. 

 

* * *

 

 

I woke up and D was gone.

 

There were no swear words strong enough for the situation, though I assure you I did my best.

 

I spent a good minute running frantically around the little area of trees that he had stopped in the night before. It took me a while, but I finally found his horse’s tracks and started running after them. Don’t ask me how he did it, because the sun’s progress said I had only been asleep for six hours, but by the time I finally caught up with D he was out of the forest (which was thirty minutes of me going at a dead run) and a good hour up the little road (again, me running my legs off). All this, and his horse’s tracks never once deviated from their pattern of a steady walk.

 

What. The. Fuck?

 

Unless he just waited until I was asleep and then immediately started off again, how could he have done that? Though, now that I think about it that _does_ sound like something he would do.

 

But enough about him. Let’s talk about me.

 

I came upon D after what I have already told you was an hour and a half of sprinting (and I’m not slow, either. Being part vampire has _some_ perks, I guess). The dick was just riding along, like he hadn’t just ditched me. Okay, technically we weren’t together to begin with and so it wasn’t really ditching _per se,_ but still – I had followed him and asked his name, and it was _implied_ , damn it, that I wanted to be around him. And he had left without so much as a ‘see ya!’

 

_Bastard!_

 

"You!" I shouted as I ran up to him from behind. He had the decency to stop his horse when I did. I came to a rough stop at his right side, glaring up at him. My heart-stopping encounter last night was forgotten. Screw the fact that I was in a prime position to be decapitated; this jerk irritated the hell out of me!

 

"What the hell was that about?!" I yelled.

 

"What?" D asked.

 

"You just left me there! I've been running after you for almost two hours!"

  

He nudged his horse back into a walk.

 

And I, debating the pros and cons of tackling and attempting to throttle someone who was older, stronger and deadlier than myself, followed after him fit to scream.

 

This was to become a reoccurring theme in my future.

 

* * *

 

 

Five days.

 

Five whole _days_ of me following him and he still had not asked why. I mean, I knew mom had always called him cold, but _god damn._ I might as well have been one of the insects buzzing around his mechanical horse.

 

After the first night I never got left behind again. This was not due to D being helpful and waking me up before he left, oh no. This was due to me not sleeping any more than two hours at a time without waking up and checking to make sure that he was still around.

 

D got to sleep for as long as he wanted, but me? I was in misery. I knew for a biological fact that I could go two weeks without a decent night of sleep before I started to hallucinate. It did not, however, take that long for me to become tired and grouchy and red-eyed every waking moment. I started to half-doze as I walked after D and, more than once, I snapped out of it only to find him a hundred yards ahead of me.

 

My body was starting to feel woozy, my eyelids were heavy and I was willing to sell my soul for a cup of coffee.

 

It occurred to me more than once that it would probably just be easier to tell D why I was following him, but each time that thought came up I crushed it down ruthlessly. Mother had told me about him, told me the best way to handle him so far as she knew, and from what I had seen over the past five days she was righter than she knew. Even if I somehow _did_ manage to reach whatever crabbed, withered excuse for a heart D might have, he still wouldn’t go easy on me. If anything, he’d probably make it harder. I would tell him, but not until I made it _very_ clear that I was going to follow him even if he refused my request.

 

That was my opinion on the fifth day of following after D, staring up at his dark back as he rode that horse ahead of me.

 

I was feeling like death warmed over, but I kept putting one foot in front of the other.

 

I had to.

 

* * *

 

 

On the eighth night, I was attacked.

 

It was my own stupid fault. Monsters seemed to be terrified of D. I couldn’t really blame them. He’d never threatened me or even glared at me, but I was still scared of him. But unlike the monsters, I knew the only reason he would attack me was if I gave him a reason to, so I always made sure to sleep for however few hours I could as close to him as I could. The monsters never bothered me because they were all scared spitless of the great Vampire Hunter, even when he slept.

 

But on the eighth night, I forgot that.

 

I was drop dead exhausted. Ordinarily, steep inclines don’t give me any problems. I’ve now got the strength and endurance to run up and down mountain trails with the best of the goats, but not without proper sleep before then. And I was running low on plasma capsules. I’d been stretching them out, trying to make them last as long as I could. D probably had some, but no way was I asking him to share. In short, I was hungry and tired. Those do not make a good combination for common sense.

 

When D stopped for the eighth night, I was lagging behind again. He was about twenty yards ahead of me. We had left the mountains behind us and were camping out on the plains below them. When D got off his horse, I just could not take another step. I collapsed to my knees, dragged my bag out to where I thought my head would land and then was asleep before I even hit it.

 

I don’t know how long I slept. It couldn’t have been for very long, because it was still dark when I woke up. As to what woke me up, it was not another D check-up. Those had been getting farther and farther apart as my body began ignoring me to get some more rest. What got me moving that night was the three hundred or so pounds of bone lion that jumped me.

 

You ever seen a bone lion? Probably not. Not unless you’ve got either a laser cannon or a lot of scars. They’re nasty things, Noble pets that started going rogue when the fall of the Nobility occurred a few thousand years back. Big, skinless, and totally vicious. I don’t have a very good idea of their biology (not like I ever dissected one, you know?) but just understand that they somehow reversed the order of their framework from muscle on bone to bone on muscle. In other words, they have very thick, very hard-to-break bones plating every inch of their bodies to protect their insides. If you have one of the aforementioned laser cannons, then you’ve got no problem. If not, then you _will_ have a lot of scars. That’s if you get to walk away afterwards, mind you.

 

So, yeah, not a great wake up call.

 

Thankfully, it was just one. They don’t get along with each other (or anything), so packs of them are rare. As it was, I still had the joy of coming to consciousness with the sudden impact of a creature landing on my middle back. They do that to break their prey’s spine and if I had been a human, that would have been it.

 

But I ain’t human.

 

So instead I got the wind knocked out of me, felt something that was probably important go _crack_ , and then spent half a second of my suddenly quite precious life thinking, _pain what happened danger where on my back very heavy oh shit kill it_. Then I bucked, slamming my hands into the ground hard enough to jolt the monster off of me before it could wrap its nasty teeth around my head and bite down. _That_ would have killed me.

 

I rolled to my feet, adrenaline knocking away my weariness and bringing the nightlife to sharp focus. Three feet away – close enough for me to spit on – the bone lion was getting back to its feet. Tired and hungry, I was in no mood to deal with this crap. I moved and crashed into it, knocking it down to the earth again, but this time I was on top. Remember that bone plating I mentioned? Well, it’s to prevent the lion from being overly harmed by just such a maneuver. I had gotten it on its back, but it was still totally capable and willing to take off my head. The damn thing was making this combination of a roar and a growl, and it was making my body rattle almost hard enough to dislodge me. The damn things are _loud_.

 

But I had it and I was going to end it. The bone armor doesn’t cover certain areas and the bottom of the throat is one of them. I guess the engineers behind this creature’s design had thought it was better for the lion to have a wider range of motion for its head than total protection. Directly in my line of sight was the thin barrier of skin and muscle that guarded the bone lion’s larynx and esophagus. I made a fist and _punched_ , throwing all of my shoulder into it. The sound it made was a wet, organic cross between _crunch_ and _sploosh_.

 

That did it.

 

Almost immediately, the bone lion ceased its movements. The ripping paws fell from the air and the teeth stopped snapping. It twitched a few times and then stilled beneath my body.

 

Heaving for breath, I crawled off the corpse and went to collect my bag. The adrenaline was leaving me and I was starting to feel even worse than before. Death warmed over had become death warmed over and then dropped on the floor for the dog to lick up. Ick.

 

I dragged my pack over to D’s camp, fell down well within range of his sword, and drifted off to sleep.

 

He never once acknowledged me, though I knew that he knew that I was there.

 

Bastard.

 

* * *

  

I woke up with the dawn, something I hadn’t done in the shadow of the forest or of the mountains. The sunlight hit my face like fire and I hissed, curling into a ball to protect myself. In the struggle the night before, my jacket’s hood and my sunglasses had both fallen off. Now I was getting the appropriate reward for my stupidity. Nothing like good old sunburn in the morning.

 

And shortly on the trail of that thought was, _oh damn. D!_

 

I reared up, one hand dragging my hood over my head to cut off some of the sun’s glare and the other groping for my bag. If I ran, I could catch up to him in half an hour, maybe, if he hadn’t gotten much of a…

 

“Is something wrong?”

 

…Head start?

 

I froze, still awkwardly half-crouching and turned my head to see D, pristine as ever, seated on the ground with a steaming kettle near a banked fire and a mug of something that smelled wonderfully like plasma tea in his hand.

 

Oh god, food!

 

My stomach _growled_.

 

But wait. Why was D still around? Usually he was moving right when the sun began to rise and that looked to have been twenty minutes ago.

 

“Um….”

 

I’m so eloquent.

 

Don’t give me that look. I don’t function well on sleep shortage.

 

After a few seconds of staring at him my brain finally came back to life.

 

“Nothing’s… wrong. I’m just wonderin’ why you’re still around. Usually, you’d be a mile off by this time.”

 

Or two, if it was a bad day.

 

“I thought you would appreciate a rest. There is more tea, if you wish,” D said, like he wasn’t suddenly acting nice-ish after more than a week of being an ice queen.

 

_What?!_

 

No, wait, this was good. This was _very_ good. If he was the one to initiate conversation, he had to be curious. This was good. I thought. I _hoped_.

 

At that point, my stomach gave another rumble and all thoughts higher than _food hungry eat_ left for the moment. He had a whole kettle full of plasma tea hot from the fire and I had not had more than a half a cup each day for the past five days. My stomach was beginning to eat itself.

 

I took the cup he offered me and quickly poured a cup of hot, steaming, delicious, nutritious, filling, _wonderful_ plasma tea, oh god, how I have missed you, baby. Yum.

 

Screw D. Right now, it’s _all_ about the meal.

 

I got through three cups of that stuff, more than I’d ever had. The first one got tossed down like a shot, but I took my time with the other two. It wasn’t out of any appreciation for the sensation of sustenance going into me (though I had plenty of it), but rather, I was pretty sure that I would throw up if I took down another cupful of tea like I had the first time.

 

After I’d finished glutting myself, I set the cup on the grass and looked at D look at me. That creepy, otherworldly look to him was still there, but it had… dimmed a little. I’m not sure if was the sunlight or just something he could do on command (which wouldn’t surprise me), but he didn’t seem quite so scary anymore.

 

“Why are you following me?” D finally asked.

 

And it had only taken him eight damn days to do it.

 

“I’ve been looking for you for a while,” I said. I’d had a long time to figure out what I wanted to say to him. As I’d followed him for the past week or so, a lot of cursing had been added to the speech (“Who the fuck do you think you are?” “Am I that insignificant to you?” “Would it kill you to say something?” “How big is that stick up your ass?” etc.). I decided not to include any of it.

 

“When I finally caught up with you in that forest, I started following you because I wanted to see how you would react before I talked to you. That’s because I’m going to follow you still, even if you say no,” I announced.

 

D didn’t so much as blink.

 

The cup on the grass next to me was suddenly very interesting and I picked it up, turning it over in my gloved hands and watching the sunlight’s reflection on the dull metal.

 

“I’m from a town called Birch, about four hundred miles southwest of here. I doubt you’ve ever heard of it. It’s a nice place, though. Real quiet. Good place to live, if you don’t like trouble. I left it about three months ago, a week after I buried my mom.”

 

I took a quick glance at D’s eyes, what little I could see of them beneath his hat’s shadow. They were as blank as ever.

 

“She was the one who told me about you.”

 

No reaction.

 

“About how you crossed that big desert with her and some others. About how you saved her, and them, more times than she could remember. About how you helped her when she found out about me. She told me that the woman who was taking her home, Granny Viper, wanted you as an escort because you were a vampire Hunter. A really good one. Maybe even the best.”

 

I tossed the cup into the air and caught it before it hit the ground.

 

“And she said that you were a dhampir, like me.”

 

He wasn’t moving. Did he remember my mother? Or was she just another in a long line of girls he had saved? Would it matter either way?

 

“That’s why I’ve been after you. There are lots of vampire Hunters, but not all of them are dhampirs, and none of the dhampirs are better at hunting vampires than you. So, I think you’d be the best to learn from. That’s why I’m here.”

 

I set the cup down, looked D full in the face across the three feet of space between us, prayed to whatever god that may have been listening, and laid my proposition down.

 

“I want you to teach me how to hunt and kill vampires.”

 

For twelve beats of my heart, there was no sound except the wind pushing against the short, green grass, and the light hiss and pop of the campfire.

 

And then….

 

“No.”


	2. Still Here

“No.”

 

With that one word, we were back to square one. D the untouchable Hunter was back in full force. Something about my request had pissed him off, because the look he was giving me was just short of a glare. My skin wanted to crawl right off my body from that look. I was suddenly very aware of the fact that I was sitting down in front of a trained killer who had his extremely sharp sword within easy grabbing distance.

 

I froze.

 

D moved.

 

His sword was out of the sheathe and moving a simple arc to come right against my neck and –

 

Nothing. It wasn’t real.

 

D was simply standing up, his undrawn blade in his hand. My mind had given me a false image, so great was my fear.

 

He took the now empty kettle from the fire, kicked the dying ashes apart with his boot to scatter them and then left for his waiting horse. I stayed where I was, sitting stock still with the metal cup in my trembling hands.

 

“You are a child.”

 

I breathed out, the insult somehow taking away the paralyzing fear that had taken over my body.

 

“Go home.”

 

Leather creaking.

 

Metal clinking.

 

Hoof beats.

 

They faded away.

 

I stayed there, sitting in the rising sunlight. The cup in my hand, with its bottom dregs of tea, grew cool.

 

And then I could hear the thin metal between my fingers _creaking_ , but that might have been my teeth crushing together in a snarl.

 

_Fuck that!_

 

I tossed the cup to the ground, grabbed my bag and my sunglasses from where they had fallen the night before, and ran after him.

 

I’d said I was going to follow him no matter what and I’d meant it.

 

Fuck you, D. You think you’re gonna get rid of me that easy?

 

* * *

 

 

On some level I knew he had been going easy on me. It was still really annoying to find that I now had to _constantly_ run to keep up with him. Damn him and his horse.

 

I’d thought it was bad before? What the hell did I know? Bad was slowly starving to death because you were down to two plasma capsules. Bad was getting, on average, four hours of sleep at night. Bad was having the prick you were following choose – _deliberately choose_ , because he had to have been doing it on purpose – to travel through the swampiest bogs, ford over the wildest rivers and scale the highest cliffs _when there were perfectly serviceable roads and bridges he could have taken instead!_

 

D, I fuckin’ hate your guts.

 

But I’m not stopping.

 

No no no. I am _not_ giving up. I will be your little shadow for as long as it takes.

 

Just watch me, you jerk.

 

* * *

 

 

Despite my bravado, there were (naturally) moments when I just wanted to throw my hands up to the clouds and scream loudly for a thunderbolt to end my miserable existence. Or D’s. I wouldn’t have minded seeing _him_ get crispified.

 

It was day thirteen and I was still in hell. I was down to one plasma capsule, which would give me a week before I had to do something drastic. I had enough money to buy a few, but there weren’t any shops around to do so. I could have strayed away from D and gone to find a town, but I had the feeling he’d make sure I never caught up with him.

 

There was, granted, option number two – go hunting. I’d done it often enough to put meat on our table back at home, but lately the thought of it was bothering me. The serum had repressed my vampire blood (and I mean _really_ repressed it) to the point where I had been able to consume human food without any trouble. Now that I was off of it, I was craving… well, something else. I could still eat normal food. I’d done it. But, the thing is, it just didn’t _feel_ right anymore. It filled me up, but my body didn’t get gratified.

 

If I ran out of plasma capsules, the only thing that _would_ give me satisfaction was the real deal.

 

And I didn’t think I could do it.

 

Hell, I didn’t _want_ to do it.

 

We live in a world where vampires are reviled monsters. They enslaved humans for over five thousand years, and spent the next five thousand years doing their damndest to fight back against their own extinction and against the aforementioned humans who were doing _their_ damndest to hasten it along.

 

They’re the oldest monsters in history. All the beasts, all the monsters that plague this world were created by or served the vampires. Many of those same creatures were bred simply to kill humans for the enjoyment of the Nobility. They got a kick out of watching humans bleed.

 

Why shouldn’t they have? Dinner and a show, two packages in one.

 

Children were taken from their families and experimented on. Sometimes they came back, sometimes they didn’t. If they did, sometimes they’d change. A mailman would go up to a house, find two weeks worth of post stuffed into the mailbox, and get concerned. He calls the sheriff. The sheriff goes into the house and finds the family spread all over the living room floor. And the walls. And the ceiling. And then he gets the joyous task of finding and staking the seven-year-old child that is not.

 

There were some that built careers out it. Noble scientists who were applauded, awarded, admired for building the most exquisite form of torture for humans. They liked to take us apart, see what made us tick.

 

…Us?

 

Heh, I’m doing it again.

 

You’re not human anymore, Dualarc.

 

You never were.

 

Problem was, I couldn’t believe it.

 

Fucking hunger.

 

I needed plasma capsules or things were going to get nasty.

 

* * *

 

 

Two days after that, the universe finally cut me a break.

 

Good timing, too. The ground moles I had seen poking their heads out of the ground by the road were starting to look pretty damn tasty. Ick.

 

D led me (okay, not really) to a tiny little town that couldn’t have been more than three hundred people strong. It was small, even by Frontier standards. That, boys and girls, is not a good thing. Less people means less defense and less defense means more paranoia towards strangers. The fact that D and I were dhampirs was not going to lend help to our standing, either.

 

Still, most of the people I’d met before catching up to D hadn’t seemed to notice what I was. If I was careful, maybe these ones wouldn’t either. If D stopped here for the night, I could get some shopping done quickly before he left.

 

D….

 

I didn’t really get why he never tried to draw less attention to himself. I mean, even if they didn’t know he was half-vampire, he was still a silent, creepy, stunningly good-looking guy and that is not something you ignore. It worked in my favor when I was tracking him down because everyone remembered when he passed through, but now that I was in danger of being affected by it I was having second thoughts about its usefulness.

 

He rode up to the town’s gates and I limped along behind him. As we approached, they creaked open and a man who could only have been the town sheriff stepped out.

 

When I was eight years old, a circus came to Birch. Mom took me to see them for a treat. I really liked the acrobats, but I also remembered the dancing bear the animal trainer had brought out. It was eight feet tall, extremely shaggy and looked like it wanted nothing better than to rip someone’s head off. The fact that it was wearing a jingly bell cap did not detract from this image. Standing in front of me now was that same bear, only it had no jingly bell cap and it was wearing a miniature rocket launcher at its hip.

 

“State your names and business,” the sheriff ordered.

 

He growled like a bear, too.

 

“D. I’m just passing through.”

 

“Dualarc, and I’m with him,” I said, jerking a very weary thumb in the asshole’s general direction. My eyesight and motor skills were not in top condition at that point, so I may have been pointing more at D’s horse. That would have explained the look the sheriff gave me.

 

Or it could have been the fact that I looked like an absolute wreck. I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. I _felt_ like an absolute wreck.

 

Oh god, I needed sleep.

 

“You okay, kid?” The sheriff asked.

 

The wreck theory bore fruit.

 

“Peachy,” I growled.

 

Apparently he didn’t buy it because he stared at me for a while longer before turning back to D.

 

“You wouldn’t happen to be the Vampire Hunter D, would you?”

 

Oh god, say no. That’s what I was thinking. _Everyone_ knew about the Vampire Hunter D, even if they didn’t know him. Everyone also knew he was a dhampir and _nobody_ willingly let a dhampir into town unless they had to. This town was fenced one, no outlying farms or ranches. If they refused entry, I was screwed. I would be drinking mole blood before the night was out.

 

I was musing on this (and possible ways to erase the memory of it afterward) when D answered, “Yes.”

 

Crash, go my hopes.

 

But like I said, the universe was finally cutting me a break.

 

The sheriff looked like he’d swallowed a wriggling lemon.

 

“Then I need you to come with me,” he said.

 

* * *

 

 

Contrary to my first conclusion at the sheriff’s statement, we were not tossed into a jail cell. Instead, he and five of his deputies escorted us to the sheriff’s office. Well, D was escorted. I just followed. The deputies were giving me sidelong looks like they couldn’t figure out what to do with me. I was expecting one them to tell me to wait outside when we reached the office, but no one did. I guess my ‘I’m with him’ statement was actually believed, although D never affirmed it. Then again, he never disaffirmed it either. I was back to being a fly on the wall to him.

 

Whatever. It worked for me at the moment.

 

The town itself was pretty tired looking. Then again, with so few people to work with, it was no wonder. Most of the buildings looked like a stiff breeze could knock them over. I know the people in the Capitol like to romanticize about the ‘rugged frontier of the world’ (which is pretty much everyplace, but the Capitol), but the reality ain’t so great. Only a few places are well off enough to fulfill the magazine picture image of bountiful orchards and verdant hills. Birch, the place I grew up, was normal for a Frontier village and we had enough trouble just keeping ourselves fed.

 

And speaking of food….

 

“Hey, sheriff?” I called as we climbed the steps leading to his office.

 

“Yeah, kid?”

 

Oh, so I’m still ‘kid’.

 

“Where’s the store around here?” I asked.

 

Plasma capsules. Need. I mentioned that, right?

 

“Main street’s just down that way,” the sheriff said, pointing to the right. “Boiz, you go with him.”

 

What, he thought I was going to do something? Couldn’t blame him, but still.

 

“S’okay. I’m not going just yet,” I said.

 

Not while there was a chance D would slip away while I was off. No way.

 

The interior of the sheriff’s office was nice and cool. It felt great getting out of the sunlight. I don’t have it so bad. There are some dhampirs who can’t go outside without getting third-degree level burns. Still, it _really_ stung.

 

The deputies stayed outside the door while the sheriff (who still hadn’t given us his name) led D around to his desk. It was stacked high with important looking papers, though that was just my thought. Maybe he just really liked origami?

 

“Nineteen years ago,” The-Sheriff-Who-Remained-Nameless said, “we had a horse come into sight of the gates half-dead from exhaustion, and its rider missing his right arm at the shoulder. He lived to give us his message before dying.”

 

He looked at D, who was leaning against the wall, and gave the Hunter a stony gaze.

 

I was ignored. Big surprise.

 

“’Vampires have taken over Skethagen,’” the sheriff repeated the dead man’s message. “Now, Skethagen’s the next town over. I don’t need to tell you that we weren’t real thrilled to get that message.”

 

Putting it lightly.

 

“I was just a deputy back then, and the sheriff sent me and some of the other boys to check it out. There were eight of us and we were the best in this whole damn town. Two days later, I was crawling back through the gates with no ammo left and half my guts hanging out. When he said that they’d taken over, he hadn’t been kidding.

 

“We’re poor, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. We couldn’t afford to hire a team of vampire Hunters, or even one. Instead, we got a set of dimensional displacement units and set them up around the Skethagen county limits. By then, the vampires had started to spread out from Skethagen, but thank god, we sealed the town away before too many of them did. We dealt with the ones we could and let it rest.”

 

It wasn’t a terrible idea. A dimensional displacement unit can take something and send it to an entirely different reality. Something’s only dangerous if it can reach you. A whole village full of vampires is something you _really_ don’t want reaching you.

 

“Like I said, that was nineteen years ago. Until about four weeks ago, we’d all but forgotten about it. Then Zario’s son went missing and turned up the next day in the forest with a bite mark on his neck.

 

“It was a nightmare. Suddenly, everybody remembered the seven hundred and something bloodsuckers that were seventeen miles away. I rode out myself to check on the displacement units and almost all of them had been destroyed, sure enough. I had to hide the few that were left, but even so, they ain’t gonna last much longer on their own. I give it three days before the displacement field collapses and Skethagen comes back.”

 

“Why hire me?” D spoke for the first time. “Why not simply repeat the displacement?”

 

Scared the hell outta me. He’s so quiet, you forget he’s there.

 

Then something new flickered over the sheriff’s face and I saw it as an even mix of rage, embarrassment and desperation.

 

“We tried. The second I got back, we put in an order for a new set. But when they arrived they were sabotaged before we could put them in place. We’ve put in another order, but they won’t be here for another two days and we can’t wait that long. Hell, _I_ can’t wait that long.”

 

Now his shaggy, bearded face was giving off a new emotion: grief.

 

“The person who sabotaged the dimensional displacers turned out to be my daughter, Ari. I found out after she tried to kill me in my sleep four nights ago. She was bitten by a vampire. That’s why she did it. It made her. And she ain’t the only one. We’ve got five other people locked up in the isolation ward of the hospital, all of them with bite marks on their necks. None of them have turned yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

 

“We’re poor, but whatever we have is yours if you sign on for us. The way I figure, we must have missed one of the vampires that escaped the displacement nineteen years ago and it’s finally come back to free the others. It ain’t stupid, either. It’s been keeping out of sight. No one’s seen anything. I don’t have any clue where to start looking, and I _can’t_ start a search on the whole town with only six people, myself included. It’ll be even less after today, because I’m sending half my deputies to meet up with the caravan holding the displacers. With any luck, they’ll get them here faster than the merchants.

 

“I want to hire you, D, to kill the vampire that’s been sleazing around my town before it gets anyone else to do its dirty work. People have been going missing. The six in the isolation ward are just the ones we’ve managed to account for. One vampire’s bad. We might have a dozen by now.”

 

I was feeling kind of sick when he gave the last bit of his speech.

 

“But I really, _really_ don’t want to think about how bad it would be if we don’t get the displacement units set up three days from now.”

 

Neither did I.

 

I’d been following D to learn the trade of a vampire Hunter. I had said that I would do whatever it took to do so. I had followed D into what _should have been_ a golden opportunity for me to do just that. If he succeeded, I’d see him kill a vampire. If he failed, I’d still get a chance to see him kill a vampire (probably a few hundred. You know, before they ate him) and I’d more than likely have a few to fight myself (you know, before they ate _me_ ).

 

Well, I’d gotten my wish.

 

And what.

 

The fuck.

 

Had I.

 

Been.

 

_THINKING?!_


	3. Maribel

I woke up some time later in the rotting shed I had gone to sleep in, with the setting sun casting red lights on the floor through the cracks in the wood.

 

I had stayed around D until I was sure he’d taken the job, which meant no chance of running off and leaving me behind if I left him. After that, the first thing I did was go to the store and buy as many plasma capsules as I could. Given that they cost an arm and a leg, I didn’t have any leftover money for a hotel room. Instead, seeing as how the weather wasn’t terrible, I bedded down in a rundown shed behind the hotel. The amount of dust said that no one had bothered to use it for quite some time, so I didn’t think there was much chance of me being kicked out for squatting.

 

Not that they would have been able to wake me up to do it.

 

Two weeks without a decent night of sleep made me _very_ exhausted and the second I hit the dirt floor of that shed, I was out like a light. I hadn’t realized just how tired I was until I left the rotting shelter and found out that I had actually slept through the remainder of the previous day, the entire night after that and the next day as well. That was a first for me.

 

But I could feel the effects it had bestowed on me. Gone was the red eyed, grouchiness. I was ready to take on the world and maybe D too. Speaking of, I really needed to find out what he had been up to….

 

…Oh. Yeah.

 

Coming soon to this location: charming ruins and undead monsters. He’d been doing his vampire killing stuff while I caught up on my much needed rest. Well, I’d come to learn from him, right? No telling what I had missed out on while I was sleeping. I had to find him quick and go back to being his little shadow.

 

Problem was, where did he go?

 

In the end, I decided to go back to the sheriff’s office. If nothing else, I could try to pick up D’s scent there. Yeah, I’m serious about that. Ever since I started cutting back on the serum, my senses had been going haywire. Sometimes they’d be normal, sometimes I’d be able to hear something moving through the grass five hundred yards away. I think it was my body trying to figure out what it wanted to do. I’d gone almost ten years as a near human and now I was letting the vampire half out more and more. Between my physical changes and my mental ones, it was like going through puberty again, I swear.

 

The streets were pretty much deserted while I walked through them. With the vampire threat running around, nobody wanted to be outside in the dark even if they were within the city walls. Couldn’t really blame them.

 

(And this coming from the guy who left to hunt the damn things. What was I thinking? Please, tell me.)

 

The sheriff wasn’t in his office, but that was okay. I didn’t need him for anything. From the stairs at his door, I stopped and breathed in the air. Following a scent isn’t easy for me. Maybe that will change one day, but for right now it sucks. On the days when my senses are stronger, I can smell _everything_ for a good distance around me. Some days, it’s okay. Nothing is overpowering, it just seems like I’m more aware of it all. Other days, I have to cover my nose with a hand all day long because it is like everything is trying ram itself up my sinuses. I’ve actually been physically sick from sensory overload a few times. It isn’t fun, believe me.

 

This was one of my good days. Nights, technically. Everyone was inside and there wasn’t any wind to mix up the smells. It helped that D had a distinctive scent too. There was something that had an old, musty smell mixed with too-sharp pine and bad morning breath. There was the warm, hunger-inducing scent of human blood and the cold, dark smell of something that I could only assume was the vampire in him, something that makes the hair on my back stand up. There was the leather that he wore, and the oil and horseflesh from the mount he rode.

 

Keep in mind, you only got those things if you stayed downwind of him for _days on end_ like I did and had nothing more interesting to do with your time than spend hours breaking his scent down into its different components. Otherwise, you just get a familiar smell, label it D and start following it.

 

So he had left the sheriff’s office, gone to the hospital, left the hospital, gone to someone’s house, left someone’s house, gone through this alley (why was there blood there? Human blood, hm…), left the alley, gone down this road, turned here, gone this way, turned there, gone that way, stayed the course, or not, whoa, abrupt turn there. Wonder what changed his mind? Gone into the big house on the hill, now closed for the night, left, gone to the stable of the hotel he was staying at ( _he_ had money), his horse wasn’t in the stall, so follow the D-and-horse scent, down to main street and -

 

“ _Halt!”_

 

Maintain dignity while wanting to scream like a little girl.

 

It was a testament to how focused I’d been on following D’s smell that I had not noticed the two heavily armed deputies stationed on either side of the town gate. Note to self, stop having tunnel vision.

 

I recognized them both from the first day in town, but I didn’t know their names. One was dark haired, the other was blond and they were both built like tanks. Seeing the absurd amount of ammunition they both had strapped around their bodies, I was suddenly struck by the urge to ask them if they had enough. Not long after, I was struck by the feeling that they would say no and be completely serious.

 

“Oh, it’s you,” Blondie said.

 

Yeah, I missed you too, chuckles.

 

“How long ago did D go through there?” I asked.

 

“He left early this morning. Him and the boss are going up to take a look around Skethagen for the bloodsucker.”

 

“Which direction is that and how far?” I asked.

 

“Ain’t tellin’,” Blondie said with a smirk.

 

I’m sorry, _what?!_

“Excuse me?” I asked, not bothering to hide the irritation in my voice.

 

“That Hunter said we weren’t to help you with anything,” the brunette told me.

 

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: D is an asshole.

 

One look at the deputies’ faces told me that not only would getting into a screaming match be totally unhelpful, but that they would enjoy every bit of it. Everything about their posture, their voices, their overall attitude said that they flat-out didn’t like me. Why? I didn’t know. I didn’t really care, because the end result was I had no idea where to go.

 

Well, that wasn’t true.

 

Scent, remember?

 

Unless D rode through a river for a mile or so, I could follow that.

 

Probably.

 

… I hoped.

 

* * *

 

 

So, yeah, I wound up staying in town after all.

 

This was more out of fear of D then fear of wildlife. I didn’t know how to react to him leaving specific instructions for my presence to the deputies. Was he back to being pissed off at me? This was the guy I was still determined to learn from. I could deal with his frigid indifference (I _had_ been dealing with it for about two weeks), but did I really want to risk him being _angry_ with me? Did I want to risk intruding on one of his hunts?

 

No.

 

The memory of that little fireside chat by the mountain slopes was still very fresh in my mind, pants wetting terror and all. I did not ever want D looking at me like that again if I could help it. Not ever.

 

So, I was going to have to find a balance between staying on what little good side he showed me and being brave enough to risk his wrath on the chance that my following him everywhere screwed up his job.

 

And I would do it. I _would_ find that balance. I had to.

 

Just… you know, not right then.

 

(Yeah, that sounded kind of pathetic, didn’t it?)

 

Okay, so D scared the living hell out of me sometimes. Most of the time. But hey, you don’t become the Frontier’s most famous Hunter by handing out cookies to little kids. D’s effect on my backbone was just one more thing to be overcome.

 

Later, though.

 

On that young night, I went to the hospital. The sheriff had said that they had a few people in the isolation ward with vampire bites and I wanted to see them. I’d heard of the symptoms, but I had never viewed them myself. It was a potentially useful to know for my desired trade. A vampire Hunter who can’t tell the difference between someone who needs his or her vampire stalker killed and someone who’s just absolutely zonked out isn’t much of a Hunter.

 

The hospital was very quiet when I walked in. The receptionist pointed me in the direction of the isolation ward after I told her I was with D. I was really starting to hope he never got around to setting the town straight on that little lie. Then again, the deputies treatment of me at the gates had somewhat killed that hope.

 

I didn’t meet any nurses on the way. I could hear them moving around in the rooms I passed, but none poked their heads out of the rooms to see what I was doing. They probably didn’t even hear me. Ever since I started traveling, I’d taken care to keep out of sight of any monsters in the forests or fields whenever I could help it. Keeping my footsteps quiet was almost a habit.

 

There were actually two isolation wards in the little hospital. One was for the standard bizarre sicknesses. The other one was a triple-reinforced solid steel vault. At least, that’s what it looked like. That was where they put the vampire victims. So late at night, I had expected it to just be the sleeping unfortunates in that room. However, when I arrived I found a girl about my age sitting next to the bed of young woman.

 

My footsteps were as quiet as ever, but I’ve yet to meet someone who can close a two-foot thick door without making a noise. She turned around and gave the most hideous start when she saw me. At the time, I didn’t know why, but I figured it out later. It was yet another sign of how used I was to being taken for a human that I didn’t think of myself, a pale, handsome young man, coming into the bitten ward of a hospital at night as something to be afraid of.

 

She screamed loud enough to make my ears hurt. While I was slapping my palms over my abused ears, she picked up the chair she had been sitting on and threw it at me. It sailed clear over the three hospital beds between us and smacked me in the shoulder. It didn’t hurt as much as it would have a year ago, but it didn’t feel dandy either.

 

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I hissed.

 

“You… You s-stay back!” She stammered, raising her tiny hands into fists. She had taken up a position in front of the young woman’s bed and looked ready to fight for it.

 

“You just _threw a chair at me_ , I don’t think you should be telling me what to do!”

 

“I’ll scream!”

 

I refrained from pointing out that it would not do any good. While they might have had cameras in here to monitor the patients visually, I didn’t see any. Without any kind of surveillance device giving feed to the outside, she could have screamed bloody murder all night long and it wouldn’t have done anything. Steel encased room with two-foot thick door, remember?

 

I took a step forward, the words ‘what the _fuck_ is your problem?!’ on the tip of my tongue. She flinched when I moved and then it clicked together in my mind just what the problem was.

 

_‘Gee Dualarc, let’s think this through. A vampire is running around. No one knows what it looks like. You are a stranger here. A pale, good-looking stranger. It is night outside. THIS IS THE BITTEN WARD. God, **why** am I such a retard?’ _

 

There wasn’t anything I could do to take away the earlier screaming and snarling (not that I wanted to. Crazy bitch, throwing chairs at people), but I immediately stepped back and hunched my shoulders down to make myself look smaller. I kept my hands at my sides and stared at the ground.

 

“I’m not a vampire,” I said. It was half true.

 

“I came here yesterday with Vampire Hunter D. I’m learning from him how to hunt. He went out with the sheriff earlier and I stayed behind. I just wanted to take a look at the victims, that’s all.”

 

There was a long moment of silence. I chanced a peek up and saw her watching me warily, a hypodermic needle held in her left hand like a knife. When had she grabbed that and from where?

 

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” She asked.

 

Glancing around the room, I saw the little intercom that was set into the wall on the other side. I pointed it at slowly.

 

“I checked in with the desk lady before I got here. I don’t think a vampire would have done that, so why don’t you just ask her?”

 

She stared at me for so long I almost snapped at her again. Then, very slowly, she stepped away from the bedside of the young woman and shuffled toward the intercom, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. When she reached it, she fumbled with the buttons for a moment before finding the right one. She never stopped looking at me, not even once.

 

The dry crackle of static filled the room when she opened the connection.

 

“Joyce?” The girl called out.

 

There was more static and then the receptionist’s crisp voice flowed out from the speaker.

 

“Yeah, Maribel?”

 

“Did a pale man check in with you a few minutes ago?”

 

“Yeah, said he was going to your area. There a problem?”

 

“No, thank you. I just needed to make sure.”

 

Her finger lifted from the button and the line closed with a whine. The needle in her hand was dropped onto a nearby nightstand.

 

Rather stupidly, I noted that she was the first person in the entire town to call me a man instead of a kid or a boy. Maybe it was the lighting?

 

“I’m sorry about that,” the girl – Maribel – said. “When I saw your face, I thought you were coming to bite my cousin.”

 

“S’all right,” I muttered, slowly stepping away from the door. It wasn’t the first time someone had made the wrong conclusion about my looks, though it _was_ the first time I’d actually been attacked. Granted, it was by a teenage girl in a skirt, but still.

 

Now that she wasn’t freaking out, I got a better look at her. She had a pretty, country face framed by dark brown hair that went past her shoulders. She had a white blouse to go with her long blue skirt. If the wrinkles in the fabric were anything to go by, she’d been wearing them for a while.

 

“No, I really am sorry,” Maribel said. “I shouldn’t have gone after you like that.” Abruptly she giggled, thought there was more hysteria than humor in it.

 

“God, I thought you were a vampire and I tossed my chair at you! Please, don’t ever tell anyone about that.”

 

“What, that I got chaired by a ninety pound girl? Don’t worry.”

 

“I’m not ninety pounds,” Maribel muttered as she walked back toward the young woman’s bedside. I took her chair with me as I joined her.

 

We sat there in silence for a while, me on the floor, before she spoke up again.

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Hm? Oh, ‘s Dualarc.”

 

“And you’re here with that Hunter?”

 

“Yeah. I’m gonna be one too.”

 

“I saw him earlier,” Maribel said quietly. I looked over and a kind of glaze had spread over her eyes. “I thought you were _him_ for a second. Then I saw your clothes and I panicked.”

 

Yeah, it was kind of hard to imagine D wearing a hoodie jacket and skinny jeans.

 

“This is my cousin, Ari,” Maribel said, gesturing at the young woman on the bed. Now that I was closer, there was a bit a resemblance between them. “I’ve been staying with her ever since she fell asleep five nights ago after she…. Well, after.”

 

The name Ari had set a little bell in my head to ringing. That was the sheriff’s daughter. The day D and I had arrived he said she had tried to kill in him in his sleep four nights earlier, the victim of a vampire’s hypnotic seduction.

 

“Do you mind if I look?” I asked, suddenly curious.

 

“What?”

 

“That’s why I came down here. To take a look at the victims. I’m learning to be a Hunter, remember? I need to know this stuff.”

 

“No,” Maribel said, her face firm. “I don’t like you talking that way.”

 

“What?” I asked.

 

“It’s my cousin, not a piece of meat. I don’t want you poking around her,” Maribel growled.

 

“You sound like I want to dissect her,” I muttered. I stood up, suddenly feeling too close to that volatile girl. There were other beds I could watch.

 

She must have figured that out too, because she hissed at me to leave the others alone. I politely asked her if she had speaking rights for anyone outside of her immediate family and she shut up. I hoped she wouldn’t mention it to anyone. Looking at comatose vampire victims isn’t technically illegal, but if you’re a stranger in town you can get kicked out for a lot less than ogling someone’s sleeping relative.

 

The next bed over from Ari held a middle-aged man with the heavy, chiseled face of a natural farmer. Gently, I tilted his head to the side and pulled the white hospital sheet away from where it had touched his chin.

 

His flesh had the look of something that should have been tan, but that sickness had stolen the life from. It was a queasy yellow-brown and the bruised black edges of the two open wounds on his neck stood out starkly against it. From so close, I could smell it like a slap to the face. Blood, pus, sweat, the itchy scent that meant it was trying to scab and that same icy scent that came from D in bits and pieces. Vampire.

 

There was something subtly different about that vampire smell, something that was somehow less… powerful than what D emitted. I think powerful is the word, though even it doesn’t exactly come to the mark. It was like the smell had been diluted.

 

Maybe it was because the power of the vampire was trying to fight against the human body’s natural defenses? There were some people who had the strength of body and will to stay awake after a vampire attack, some even capable of walking and fighting. Was this man, even in a coma, trying to come back to his family and friends?

 

I was still wondering about that when the farmer looking fellow opened unseeing eyes and lunged at me.


	4. Not Helpful

I reared back and the man’s fingers just barely grazed my chin. His nails were sharp enough to draw blood when they touched me.

 

I scrambled back and almost fell over. One step later and I did fall over when the backs of my knees collided with Ari’s bed. I fell over her, my upper back hitting the floor and my legs sticking into the air. Maribel was screaming next to me.

 

_‘Why don’t you throw a damned chair at **him**?!’ _

 

I could hear the man getting up, cloth sheets ruffling and bare feet slapping against the floor. There were other, similar sounds from all around. Beneath my legs and the sheet, I could feel Ari’s fingers moving. There was a surge of warmth as their body heat rose a few degrees and filled the room with the smell of fast moving human blood. The comatose victims were all coming back to life and, if the farmer-type was any estimate of the others, they weren’t in a good mood.

 

I twisted violently, trying with frantic haste to get my feet back under me where they belonged in a fight. Maribel was still unhelpfully screaming. I got back up just as the farmer reached the other side of Ari’s bed and lunged at Maribel. She ducked out of the way right as I swung my left fist and, as carefully as I could, gave the vampire victim a punch to the forehead. I didn’t want to kill him if I could help it, but there wasn’t much else I could do in the situation if that first hit failed to do the trick. There were others coming from all corners of the room, Ari was right beneath me and I couldn’t be gentle if I wanted to get out alive. Maribel wasn’t helping matters. I couldn’t see a weapon on her, so unless she had martial arts training like I did she was just going to be in the way.

 

Against my fears, the man did crumple after my love tap. That was the first time I’d ever used my vampire strength against a human being. It was easier than I thought it would be. Then again, he _was_ trying to rip out my throat at the time. That probably eliminated a lot of the guilt.

 

The farmer was down, but I still had five other glass-eyed people coming at me. They were stumbling, but they were still moving pretty fast for coma victims. Maribel was running for the ward door, which I was suddenly wishing I had left open. The thing had to weigh at least a ton and even with the hydraulic system to help push it, it still was a pain to move.

 

“Get the fuckin’ door open!” I screamed.

 

“I’m trying!” Maribel yelled.

 

She was hurriedly attacking the controls for the door, a position that left her back to the rest of the room. The patient nearest to her ignored me and started stumbling towards Maribel. That was the last I saw before a young man with green eyes and a heavy, middle-aged woman invaded my personal space rather violently. Ari attacking my legs from her bed did not help matters. I had been trying to get to the aisle in the middle of the room, but she had grabbed my jacket before I got very far and I hadn’t been able to get her hand loose before the other two got near me.

 

A person who is enthralled to a vampire isn’t exactly limited to human capabilities. Even from a single bite, if the person goes under the sway of the spell they gain some of their master’s powers. I don’t mean turning into fog or commanding wolves. I mean resistance to pain; as in, I broke the green-eyed teenager’s wrist when he grabbed me and the bastard still didn’t let go. Problem, much? Yeah. Fending the older woman away from my throat with one hand and trying my best to haul myself out of Ari’s grip didn’t leave me with a lot of options. Thankfully, this guy wasn’t too smart. When I stopped pushing at his chest with my other hand and he swooped in with his dull teeth snapping for my face, I cold cocked him and he went down. I felt something give when I hit him. It occurred to me, very distantly, like it was happening to someone else, that I might have just cracked his skull and killed him.

 

Of course, that was when Maribel screamed again.

 

I had smelled her fear before. Now it was spiking sharply alongside her heart rate, which had already been racing. The room _flooded_ with the mouth-tightening, sour smell of terror. Forgetting gentleness, I shoved my palm as hard as I could against the older woman’s chest and turned around to face Maribel even as the corner of my right eye saw the woman go flying across the entire isolation ward to smack against the wall. Ari’s grip on my jacket tightened and she pulled at me, the fabric tightening across my shoulders.

 

That, naturally, was nothing next to the sight of Maribel hysterically trying to slide between the six inch gap that had opened between the ward door and the wall, while the fifth patient steadily dragged her back by her blouse.

 

For the record, I didn’t like her. She threw a chair at me. Seriously though, if you saw someone about to be hurt, what would you have done in my place? I jumped, Ari’s fingers ripping loose from my jacket. From behind me came the frustrated howl of the sixth and final patient who had been slowest to come after me. My jump carried me clear across the three beds between me and the door. I landed hard, not expecting such a response from my legs, but even then I still used my momentum to my advantage and slammed a shoulder into the man holding Maribel. He was shoved into the wall and I felt more than heard the air come exploding out of his mouth. His grip on Maribel’s blouse hadn’t let up, even then.

 

I could hear movement from behind me - Ari and the last victim. There wasn’t time to be gentle, as I’ve said before, and I wanted _out_ of the damned isolation ward. Maribel’s screaming was really getting painful on my ears, too. The enthralled man wouldn’t let go in time, I already knew it, and so I didn’t try to make him. Instead, I grabbed Maribel’s blouse sleeve above his own grip and ripped it down, tearing off the whole arm covering. The door’s hydraulic pressure system had finally opened it enough for Maribel to fall through and the moment I got her out of the man’s grasp that was exactly what she did. Tossing him aside, I slipped out with her and slammed my hand down on the close button on the other side.

 

The heavy door groaned at the sudden change of command and slowly, far too slowly, began swinging shut. It wasn’t going to make it in time. With four inches to go, a pale hand with too-long nails thrust through the opening and began clawing at the air. A practically bloodless face glared at me from behind the door. Ari.

 

I had a very clear premonition of the sheriff coming back to the hospital and finding out that his daughter had lost an arm.

 

At three inches to go (and with Maribel realizing that her cousin wasn’t going to pull away. “Ari, your arm! _Stop!_ ”) I stepped in close, grabbed Ari’s upper arm when it passed near me and shoved her back into the room. I heard her hit the floor and snarl before the door finally swung shut. The sound of the sixth victim scrabbling at the door remained until the heavy barrier closed. Then it was finally done, we were out and Maribel was locking the door via the control console next to me.

 

There was blessed silence.

 

The air in the hallway was almost cold where it touched me. My body’s heat had risen slightly from exertion. I was panting. Turning away from the door, I began to ask Maribel if she was all right.

 

My world dropped out from under me.

 

Suddenly, all of my enhanced senses could focus on nothing but _her._ I was hyper aware of Maribel’s beating heart, her body heat and her scent. The smell of her hot, racing blood was nearly enough to undo me and it was only at that point that I realized, to my gut-chilling horror, that my panting tongue could feel sharp points when it slid over my teeth. That disgusting realization was enough to make me stagger away from her and into the wall behind me.

 

That made Maribel turn away from the console and towards me. I didn’t look her in the eye; I didn’t even try to peek down her blouse when she came close to me, bending down low. Her chest held no appeal for me; it was all in her scent, in her breath, in her heat. I had thought I knew what a vampire’s urges were. They had come to me sometimes, as they had during the last few days before we reached that town. It was always a faint inclination, almost wistfulness, like having the aroma of a roasting steak drift past your nose. Tempting, sure, but nothing I couldn’t ignore with some effort.

 

Now I knew different and God, it was terrifying. This wasn’t a roasting steak three rooms away from a hungry boy; this was a five course, gourmet meal laid out in front of a starving man. This was water in the desert for a throat that had, somehow, become so parched I was feeling cracks in it. This was a drug that had my hands shaking to reach out and take it. There was nothing carnal about it. Maybe it would have been easier if it had sexual, because I’d been dealing with that since I was twelve, but this was different. There was older than sex, simpler than sex. What was desire compared to _hunger?_

 

“Dualarc, you’re bleeding,” Maribel said and reached for my face.

 

I knew then what was going to happen. I was going to bite her and feed on her. I was going to throw her body back into the isolation ward and blame it on the sucklings. I was going to walk out of the hospital bloated like a leech on this human girl’s blood. I _knew_ it.

 

Her fingertips, so warm, brushed my jaw.

 

Time stopped.

 

I could see every pore on her face, every lash on her eyes. I could smell every inch of her, overpowering all the other scents in the hospital corridor. I could hear her heartbeat. Her living heartbeat.

 

In that single second, I was a vampire.

 

“Dualarc?”

 

I don’t know how I managed to look at her eyes and actually see them. I still don’t, not even to this day. I hope that it was my human half. I don’t know what else what would have made me remember my mother, bleeding from the neck on the floor of our defiled home.

 

“Go get help,” I whispered. Shaking, my hand clumsily knocked her fingers away.

 

“Go get help, _now_.”

 

For her sake and for my own.

 

* * *

 

 

The blond deputy from the gate was the one to come running into the hospital lobby. In the time between Maribel leaving me in the hallway and making the call over the radio, I had gotten a hold over myself once again. I was waiting with her and the receptionist, who had pulled a machine gun out of her desk. Even knowing that they had to have set up extra security with the vampire problem, it still surprised the hell out of me. How had she hidden it in there in the first place?

 

Blondie’s first reaction was to ask Maribel if I had done anything. It was logically understandable and emotionally irritating. Thankfully, Maribel’s annoyance at my earlier attitude had faded away in light of the fact that I had saved her life. She told him such and he got marginally politer after that. Once that was all straightened out, he and I both started back towards the isolation ward. Maribel was left waiting at the receptionist’s desk, while the desk lady herself and two of the on-duty doctors followed the deputy and me to provide cover. Maribel would keep track of our progress through the monitor and call for help from the last remaining deputy and the town militia if any of the victims slipped past us. Apparently the hospital _did_ have monitoring equipment for that ward; it was just that they couldn’t wire it up inside the room, so all of the video feed came from the halls surrounding it. I don’t know why they couldn’t have gotten a camera in there when they had managed to do it with an intercom, but what the hell do I know about tech stuff?

 

It was a morbid party that trekked through the halls. The doctors were worried about the patients (bitten and otherwise), the receptionist kept fingering the safety on her machine gun, the deputy was giving me sidelong glances that just screamed _do not want_ and I was a nervous wreck, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. I did not want to go back there.

 

During my wait with Maribel, I had had a few minutes to puzzle out my reaction to her presence after the scuffle. I had never – and I mean _never_ – reacted like that to someone before. The only thing I could think of that may have triggered it was the fight. My adrenaline had shot up and I was scared, angry and exhilarated all at once. My body had kicked into overdrive to deal with the threat, the same thing any human’s body would do in the same situation. The problem was that I wasn’t entirely human, a fact that I was still having trouble accepting. Though I couldn’t say I regretted the ten years of normalcy the serum had given me, after so many years of using it I simply had no idea how to be a dhampir.

 

If I had lived my life with my vampire half as nature intended, maybe I would have handled the come down from the combat high better. As it was, I had found myself alone with over stimulated senses and a very tempting piece of meat that just happened to be alive and sentient. I had damn near killed Maribel in that hallway, not ten seconds after saving her from death. Now I was going back to it, possibly to fight again, and I had with me not one, but four antsy humans who were giving off enough fear to make my nose sting.

 

I knew what could happen, so I told myself that I would handle the hunger if it came again.

 

When we stopped in front of the vault door and the deputy punched in the command code to unlock, I was still telling myself that.

 

Also, I was still not believing it.

 

But if I ran away nothing would get better and someone might die if I wasn’t around to help. I had known this life would be hard when I left Birch. I had thought I had known, at least. Now I was learning it might be harder than I could handle.

 

Not like I wasn’t going to try anyway.

 

The heavy door slowly groaned open. I heard nothing coming from behind it, though there was certainly enough noise from the people behind me. The receptionist and the two doctors, both armed with laser pistols, had taken up position at the end of the hall and were ready to start blasting away if anything jumped at the deputy or me. I hoped that their aim was good enough to avoid hitting either of us.

 

A few seconds later, the massive door was opened and I stepped inside the isolation ward. There was the smell of blood (human, with the faint tinge of vampire), but no noise. Nothing overt, anyway. Concentrating, I could faintly hear the heartbeats of the patients, but they were slow and steady again. My hunch was confirmed when I looked behind the door and saw the man who had tried to grab Maribel curled up on the floor. The vampire victims had all gone back to sleep.

 

“They aren’t awake,” I called back to the deputy, who was courageously ready to charge in to save me if something _was_ ready to attack. At least, that was what his face said. “It looks like they’ve all gone back to sleep.”

 

After all the tension we had felt walking through the hallway, this was kind of a letdown. Not that I was going to complain.

 

We bundled the patients back into their beds and the doctors set restraints on them. Needless to say, the visiting hours for this part of the hospital were out indefinitely. If the vampire was strong enough to control even one of his minions from a distance, to say nothing of all of them, then they were going to be treated as though they were full-fledged vampires until they were either cured or killed. That meant armed guards and no sympathetic relatives.

 

After that, the deputy had Maribel and I give our statements in the lobby with the receptionist taking down our words for the record. The only thing we both unanimously (though silently) agreed to leave out was the chair throwing business. There were just some things that never needed to be mentioned.

 

He seemed very interested to learn that it wasn’t until _after_ I had arrived that the victims had gotten unruly. I say fuck him; it was coincidence and nothing else. If it was because of my presence, then it was my fault only through sheer accident. They hadn’t gone wild when I went into the isolation ward with Deputy Suspicious, so I was pretty sure that it really wasn’t my fault.

 

And _of course_ D and the sheriff had to come through the double sliding doors just as I was getting ready to leave.

 

The sheriff immediately went to his niece. D didn’t give any of us so much as a look. He just listened to what Maribel was saying to her uncle and then, very calmly, asked her to tell him what happened. What, I couldn’t have done it? So the whole story got out again and when it was over with I was following D, going back out into the night.

 

D didn’t say anything at all while we walked. Not a word about me going away or my version of what had happened or why he had told the two deputies to be quiet about his trip to Skethagen. I was invisible again. I don’t know why it was starting to grate on me like that. It wasn’t like anything had changed from the last two weeks. Still, as I stared at the back of his black coat there was an undeniable urge to punch him.

 

While I walked, I thought about what I was going to do next. I could find Skethagen on my own (I mean, he couldn’t have told everyone in the entire town to keep their mouths shut), but what would I do when I got there? The entire area was still in another dimension and there was a high chance that the vampire could be somewhere around there looking for the rest of displacement units. Conversely, I could stay in town, but, again, what would I do? The only people I knew connected to this mess were the sheriff and Maribel. She might be willing to help me out even if he probably wouldn’t, but what would I ask of her? Fuck, I didn’t have a _clue_ what to do!

 

D wasn’t going to be any help. My escapade in the hospital hadn’t done anything to raise my status in his eyes. This sucked because there were things I wanted – no, _needed_ to ask him. Was there any way to control the hunger? Was it always that powerful? How could I stop my senses from swamping me with information? How far could I push my vampire strength before I hurt a human? None of it made any difference, because his turned back said that I was still that shaking kid on the mountain slopes to him. A useless child who should go home.

 

I had been revisiting my earlier impression of him over the past few weeks. It had to be wrong. Not the ‘I never want to piss this guy off’ impression ( _that_ had only been reinforced), but the other one. I mean, if it were true then he would have noticed it too, right? He would have _said_ something, because not even the coldest son of a bitch could ignore their own -

 

“Why are you still here?”

 

My heart jumped into my throat.

 

You never really forget that D is around; the guy stands out too much for that. It is just that he is so damn _quiet_. When he finally speaks, it feels like someone grabbed a megaphone and screamed into your ear. You get struck dumb and flounder around for a few painful seconds before you remember what to do.

 

“You know why,” I said sullenly and then wished I hadn’t. Hell, he had called me a child and now I was acting like one! “I’m not leaving until I’ve learned how to hunt vampires.”

 

“I am not going to teach you,” D answered. “If you stay in this area when things get bad you will likely be injured or killed, if only because of your false association with me. Far more likely, one of the locals will go after you for some reason or another.”

 

… _What?_

 

“Don’t be dumb. Why the hell would they do that?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to swallow them back up. I had just called D stupid. Fuck me.

 

The look he sent back at me suggested _I_ was the idiot.

 

“This a tense time and they are afraid. They seek a release for that fear. You are a stranger, someone they will not feel remorse for hurting.”

 

There was a certain amount of truth to it, but I still didn’t believe him. No one had acted that way back home, no matter how bad the monster attacks from the forest had gotten. No one tried to blame anything on the peddlers and Hunters who came through. I told him such.

 

“You’re telling me this is different because the problem is a vampire?” I asked.

 

_That_ was when he stopped.

 

We had cut through a small alley to save time getting to wherever D was going. Through sheer chance or careful planning on his part, I now found myself alone in a small space with a bigger, older, more frightening person than myself slowly turning around to give me a flat, unreadable look.

 

“It is different,” D said slowly, “because you are a dhampir.”

 

* * *

 

 

With our longest conversation to date ending with me not having an answer to a statement I couldn’t figure out, D returned to walking through the empty streets of the town. I started chasing after him as soon as I remembered I had legs.

 

It was different because I was a dhampir. What did that mean? I mean, no one would actually… well, okay, they _would_. I’d been lucky enough to pass for an extremely pale, handsome human for the most part of my travels, but every now and then someone had seen what I was and it had never ended well for me. I’d gotten the short end of the stick in some of my purchases, been forced to camp outside after being denied a room at an inn and once I’d run out of town not even a day after entering it because someone started saying they had seen me bite a woman. I knew I was going to be insulted, mistreated and ripped off for being a dhampir. It was just part of the deal and I was learning to live with it, however infuriating it was.

 

But for him to say that these people could _kill_ _me_ for it? Really kill me, just for being half vampire? I mean, I’d heard stories of things like that happening, but….

 

…Oh, shit.

 

What if he was right?

 

Everyone knew Vampire Hunter D was a dhampir and I shared enough similarities with him for people to put two and two together and realize that I was a dhampir as well. So, these people probably knew what I was. Maribel definitely did.

 

…Maribel….

 

When I asked D, just before he closed his room’s door shut in my face, what had happened with him and the sheriff I realized that I _did_ have some things I wanted to talk to her about. If I couldn’t get an idea of what was going on from Mr. Icicle, maybe her uncle would tell me. Better yet, maybe he could tell her and she would tell me. If his deputies knew that they weren’t supposed to help me, I was betting the sheriff had gotten that same memo. There went my Hunter’s apprentice façade. Thanks a lot D, you damn bitch.

 

With my vampire Hunter closeted up in his room for the rest of the night, I left his hotel and started tracking down Maribel’s scent.


	5. Dizzy

It was rather creepily quiet in town. At least, kind of. There wasn’t any noise coming from the streets. There _was_ noise leaking out to me from the houses. Here’s a funny thing: my senses hadn’t returned to normal since that little fracas in the hospital. Usually, they swung back and forth between almost-normal and hyper active. For the last hour or so, however, they had been giving me a constant, high speed flood of information. It was even more than I had been getting on my wildest days.

 

_That_ , ladies and gentlemen, was a bit uncomfortable.

 

I heard rats scurrying without even seeing them and knew that they were hiding under the porch eighty yards ahead of me. The lightest breeze touched me and I could feel _every single pore_ on my skin tighten from the cold. I smelled a warm scent on the wind and knew that there was a cow about half a mile back. Moreover, I knew that it was pregnant. Don’t ask me to explain that one.

 

I actually had to stop and sit down on my way to Maribel’s house. Tucking my head between my knees, I breathed in and out as slowly as I could. It had been scary at the hospital, interesting on the way to D’s hotel and now it was just plain making me nauseous. My brain was getting fried from sensory overload, _again._

 

You ever had this happen to you? Well, it sucks. You want to vomit your guts out and it feels like your head is going to pop open. The only way I’ve found to make it stop is to get comfortable and shut off as many of your senses as you can. That means curl up, shut your eyes, cover your ears, shove your nose into your knees and don’t taste _anything_ , even the air. Ideally, you’ll feel normal again in a few minutes.

 

That night, I only made it maybe one mile from D’s hotel before I had to stop and rest. I slunk miserably into an alley and dropped down to embrace the fetal position. It made the spinning stop, a little. I had stopped in the hope of my perceptions going back to normal. An hour passed me by, then another, and they _didn’t._ I could still hear the baby six houses down crying. I could still feel the ground vibrating from footsteps across the street.

 

In a word - fuck.

 

It wasn’t going away. For whatever reason, it appeared that I was going to have to deal with my newly cranked up senses for at least the rest of the night. You can imagine the great joy this thought brought me.

 

But hey, what could I do? I was still a whiny brat, but almost four months on the road had (I liked to think) made me a _tough_ , whiny brat. If I had to rest every few hundred yards on the way to Maribel’s house, then I had to rest every few hundred yards on the way to Maribel’s house. As appealing as the thought of crawling under a house was, the thought of getting some information was better. At least, I kept telling myself that.

 

So, I got back up. Damn near barfed up a lung, but I got up. After that, it was back to staggering and weaving through the town’s empty streets, following the faded scent of Maribel. She kind of smelled like gingersnaps and fresh cut grass, for some reason. Maybe she liked baking and yard work?

 

For once, I was glad no one was around. It meant no one saw me fall down four times and eat dirt when I couldn’t keep my footing. Stupid vampire blood.

 

I eventually did make it to Maribel’s house. Well, actually it was the sheriff’s house; Maribel just happened to share it with him and Ari. I could hear him moving around in the lower level. However, I had a hunch that the peacekeeper wouldn’t be thrilled to have a green-tinged dhampir knocking on his door at night.

 

There was another heartbeat coming from the second level and I assumed it to be Maribel’s. Yeah, my hearing had gotten that good. Creepy, huh? Discretion is the better part of valor (supposedly), so I started climbing up the outside of the house. Reaching the window nearest to the heartbeat and breathing, I ever-so-gently tapped the glass.

 

She stopped breathing for a moment.

 

Score.

 

My nails skittered across the window panes again.

 

A moment later and Maribel’s pale, frightened face was staring at mine.

 

‘Dualarc?’ I saw her lips say soundlessly.

 

“It’s me,” I hissed. “I need to talk to you. Open the window, please!”

 

She blinked, obviously wondering if she was dreaming. Then she reached up a hand and unlocked the window. It slid silently up at her touch and I awkwardly heaved myself into her room to crash onto her narrow bed.

 

Below us, the sheriff’s footsteps had ominously stopped.

 

“Under my bed,” Maribel hissed. “ _Quick!”_

 

I wasn’t really in any position to decline. I’d seen that monstrous gun her uncle carried around and even if it there hadn’t been a vampire roaming around, I was still a teenage boy climbing into his virgin niece’s room at night. Do the math yourself.

 

I tried – and failed – to quietly get off her bed and onto the floor. There was a depressingly loud thump after I lost my balance and fell. From there it was a frantic spider scuttle to squeeze myself into the tiny eight inch space between bed and floor. I finally made it just as the sheriff finished climbing the stairs and started down the hallway to Maribel’s room. He didn’t even bother knocking. Maribel managed to drape some of her comforter between me and him just as he opened the door to look inside.

 

“Maribel? Everything okay?” He asked.

 

“Yeah, Uncle Mervin. I just had a nightmare and fell outta bed.”

 

Well, it wasn’t the most _original_ story, but it would hopefully….

 

…Mervin? Her uncle’s name was _Mervin?_

 

Oh God, don’t laugh. You are a dead boy if you laugh, Dualarc. Don’t. Laugh.

 

“Bump your head?”

 

“Nah, I’m okay. Uh, sorry if I woke you up, Uncle Mervin.”

 

“ _Heeheeheehee…._ ”

 

“What was that?”

 

“I, uh, think it’s the rats again. You know, it’s been a while since we put out some poison.”

 

“Hm, I’ll pick some up tomorrow at the store.”

 

“Okay. G’night.”

 

The door closed.

 

I listened to his footsteps as they receded and went back downstairs. When I was certain he was no longer in immediate hearing range, I carefully crawled back out and was promptly hit over the head with a pillow.

 

“You _moron!_ ” Maribel hissed. “What are you doing, coming to my room in the middle of the night?!”

 

“You _let me in_! What are you complaining about?!”

 

“I _had_ to! It looked like you were going to fall!”

 

I hate to admit it, but she was right. It had been getting kind of hard to hold on near the end.

 

“I wasn’t!” I growled at her. “I just want to ask you some questions and then I’ll leave.”

 

“What kind of questions?”

 

“Did your uncle tell you anything about what happened to him and D today?”

 

Right away, I knew I had said something wrong. Something in her face closed off.

 

“I knew it,” she whispered. “D really hasn’t agreed to teach you, has he?”

 

Shit.

 

“I never said he had,” I said evasively.

 

“You liar,” Maribel spat. “Uncle Mervin told me that D had said you’re just a kid who’s trying to be something you ain’t. Gimme one good reason why I shouldn’t holler right now.”

 

“Okay,” I ground out between clenched teeth. “How about, _I saved your ungrateful hide!”_

 

I froze, instantly on the alert for anything from the sheriff. Nothing came. He was still softly pacing below us.

 

Maribel, meanwhile, had changed expressions again. She didn’t look happy, but she didn’t look like she was about to rat me out either.

 

“Well?” I pressed.

 

“Why are you here?” Maribel whispered.

 

“I just said – “

 

“I don’t mean like that,” Maribel scowled. “I mean, why are you following D? He doesn’t want you around. Even I can see that. If helping you is going to make his job harder, then I won’t.”

 

I scowled at her, but she remained unmoved. What a wonderful night it was turning out to be. I was sick, trespassing and being interrogated by a girl I could throw over a fence like a Frisbee.

 

“I _wasn’t_ lying,” I insisted. “At least, not really. I never said that D was teaching me. Just that I was learning from him. He _is_ going to be my teacher one day, even if I have to sell my soul to get him to agree to it. Until then, I just have to start learning as much as I can on my own, while I follow him around. D doesn’t tell me anything. Like you said, he thinks I’m just a kid. I want to know what he was doing today, Maribel. That’s all. I can’t say I’ll be able to do anything that will help D, but I’m definitely not going to do anything that will screw up his hunt. As far as I’m concerned, one less vampire in the world is a good thing.”

 

“But aren’t you a…” She left the question hanging in the air, unable to say the word.

 

“Dhampir? Yeah,” I grinned weakly. “I am. Doesn’t mean I like vampires, though. I was raised by my mom and she’s a genuine, one hundred percent human.”

 

I frowned, the old pain flaring up again in my heart.

 

“At least, she was. She’s dead now.”

 

Funny, how that realization kept popping up. I’d pass a bakery and think, _wow, mom sure would like those cinnamon rolls_. Then right on the heels of that would be, _Oh, wait. She sure **would have** liked those cinnamon rolls. She’s dead now, remember? _

 

Almost four months ago, I had buried her. Four months to think about it and it still hadn’t sunk in.

 

What would happen, I wondered, when it finally did?

 

“I’m sorry,” Maribel whispered.

 

“Don’t be. ‘S not your fault,” I muttered. “It was a vampire that killed her. That’s why I want to be a Hunter. D’s the best one around and I want to learn from him. So, I’m not leaving his side until I don’t need him anymore. Understand?”

 

“I guess,” Maribel whispered. “All right, fine. But don’t let anyone know about this, okay? I’m not supposed to know either and Uncle Mervin would give me ten shades of hell if he heard I’d told somebody else.”

 

* * *

  

Maribel, as it turned out, had perfected that much criminalized, highly useful skill of dropping eaves. She had been listening in when Sheriff Mervin (snort, giggle… ahem) gave his report to his remaining deputies. Of the five, he had sent three out to meet the caravan with the dimensional displacement units in the hope that they could get them here faster. The ones left behind were Blondie and Other Guy.

 

As it went, the sheriff had decided to go out into the Skethagen area in the hopes of finding the vampire’s nest. Some of the hunters in the area (the regular ones, that is) had reported killing animals with twin puncture wounds in their necks. Added to the fact that most of the bitten people were found outside of the town, it seemed likely that the vampire master was hiding out around the displaced area.

 

D had gone with him because he had reached the same conclusion. Leaving the two deputies in charge, they had ridden to the Skethagen county limits through the nearby forest. They hadn’t been in there very long before some of the local wildlife got it into their heads that it was lunch time. The thing was, when D and the sheriff examined the monsters they had killed, they found bite marks on _every single one_.

 

The good news – the vampire was definitely in the forest.

 

The bad news – unless he or she was staked real soon, there was going to be a _very_ ugly fight to get the new displacement units in place. The vampire would be trying to prevent the second removal of Skethagen and now it had who-knew how many furry forest friends to do its bidding. That wasn’t even counting the bitten humans. That many thralls against one sheriff, five deputies and one Hunter was not a gamble I cared to make.

 

The sun had begun to set and D had insisted that they turn back. I think it was more for the sheriff’s safety then his own. Night or day, D was D. You do not screw with him. Apparently the sheriff eventually realized this as well and agreed to come back to town.

 

That the patients had begun their attack on Maribel and me when the sheriff and D were less than an hour away was very interesting. Had the attack really been meant for the sheriff? Maribel said that he visited Ari every night after he got off of work. If he hadn’t been late coming back, if he hadn’t argued with D to stay longer, he would have arrived more or less just as the assault started.

 

As it was, they had nearly gotten his niece. Losing both of his girls in a week would have killed him, or near to it. In a way, the vampire nearly succeeded.

 

So, I’d gotten my information.

 

Now what did I do with it?

 

* * *

 

I sat quietly for a few moments until I was sure Maribel had stopped speaking.

 

“Thank you,” I finally said.

 

“You saved me, remember? I’m just trying to pay you back,” Maribel responded.

 

“Thanks just the same,” I murmured. “One more thing – who else has gone missing? I heard that the ones in the bitten ward were just the ones who were found and that there are people still unaccounted for. Who are they?”

 

“Well, Ari you know about,” Maribel whispered. “The other ones we’ve found are Zario’s son Horantio, Mr. and Mrs. Kaust, our schoolteacher Mr. Tim and Zack Geladir. That leaves eight people missing. They might be dead or turned or they might have just packed up and ran off. Wouldn’t blame ‘em, really.”

 

“Who are they?” I asked.

 

“Well, the entire Nob family, for starters. Me and some friends went down to their house to give Emily her homework after she missed a day of class and there wasn’t anyone inside when we opened the door. She wasn’t there, and neither were her parents or her little brother. Granny Zefula’s gone. She lived on the north end of town and made cookies every day. Then there’s also Shu, Fergusson and Kiev. Those last three were always together. Shu and Kiev went missing first, then Fergusson disappeared one day later.”

 

“Huh,” I muttered.

 

“What?” Maribel asked.

 

“Uh, nothing. Just trying to figure out what comes next, I guess.”

 

“Well, it won’t be coming in here,” Maribel said. Her frown had come back. “I told you what you wanted. Now get out before my uncle comes back! I don’t want to explain why I’ve got a boy in my room at night.”

 

Point for her. That wasn’t something I’d enjoy either.

 

My nausea had receded a bit during our conversation, but it started right back up where it left off once I stood up. For a moment, there were two Maribels in front of me instead of one. A few seconds to stabilize myself had that taken care of, but the churning in my gut and the hollowness in my head remained. Climbing out of her window was going to be fun.

 

She made me take off my shoes before I crawled over her bed. Maybe it was a desire to hide evidence or maybe it was a way to get back at me for coming there in the first place. An upside was that I made much less noise dropping out of her window (and I do mean _dropping_ ). There was a major ‘oh shit’ moment when I fell passed the window of the dining room on my way down. The sheriff’s massive, muscular frame was not three feet away from me, but he was facing the other direction. He couldn’t have seen me. At least, that was what I chanted over and over again as I huddled beneath the window sill until I heard him moving away.

 

Eleven minutes to the second after I started climbing up to Maribel’s window, I was dashing away back into the town’s center once more.

 

One minute after that, I finally remembered to put my frigging shoes back on.

 

* * *

 

It was coming up on two in the morning as I walked back to my hovel. After the fight at the hospital, I’d been wishing for something more intimidating than my bare hands. To that end, I was going back to retrieve the fighting gloves that I had stashed in my backpack. They weren’t flashy things, but getting popped in the mouth with them still hurt like a bitch. Master had used his on me a few times and they always made my head ring. While I walked, I used the information Maribel had given me as distraction against the feeling of sickness.

 

Number one – the vampire was almost definitely hiding in the forest somewhere. That gave it at least twenty-three square miles to hide in.

 

Number two – eight people were still missing. Bitten or otherwise, no one knew.

 

Number three – the number of thralls, human and animal, was steadily rising.

 

Number four – the deputies sent to retrieve the dimensional displacement units would likely arrive late tomorrow, or technically today, and definitely by the next moonrise.

 

Number five – based on numbers three and four, it seemed logical that a nasty fight was on the way. Maybe a small scale war.

 

So, what? What did I do now?

 

Go look for the vampire? Uh, _no._

 

Go nag D? Again, no. Best case scenario, he’d just keep ignoring me. Far more likely, he’d reach the limit of his temper and remove a few of my more vital organs.

 

Go harass the hospital again? No. Being attacked in a confined space once was more than enough.

 

Go look for the missing people? Cha-ching, we have a winner. If my senses weren’t going back to normal anytime soon, I could at least make some use of them.

 

So, where the hell was the Nob family’s house?

 

Well, as it turned out the Nob family house was the exact same big house on a hill that I had followed his scent to earlier. After a quick stop at my shack to grab my fighting gloves out of my bag (I can’t believe I left them there to begin with when I knew there was a vampire around. Idiot), I helped myself to the town registry at the public library. No, it wasn’t breaking and entering. It’s a _public_ library, you see. I am clearly one of the public and how can you break into something that should always be open to you?

 

So, with the address in mind I walked to the house and found myself staring at one of D’s earlier stops. Once again, I was following that frigid bastard’s footsteps. Maybe this was a sign?

 

**I AM FATE AND I SAY THAT YOU SHALL ALWAYS BE BEHIND HIM NYAR HAR HAR HAR!**

 

Yeah, fuck it. It wasn’t really a time to ponder the ironies of the universe, anyway. Not when I thought I could see something moving in the upper floor a supposed to be deserted house.

 

The front gate was unlocked, though that wouldn’t have made a difference. Maribel’s window was too far off the ground, but I could vault over an eight foot fence without much problem. The front yard was an empty expanse of cushy grass that made me feel like I was walking on springs. I wish I could say that I stealthily crept up to the house, but I can’t. There was nothing to do but run up the lawn and hope that whoever was up there didn’t notice.

 

The moon had the decency to get hidden behind some clouds, but it was still pretty bright out. It felt like there was a target sign on my forehead when I ran up the lawn. The door was locked when I arrived at the front porch, but it didn’t take me long to find a window that wasn’t. Either the town didn’t have any troublemakers or thieves, or no one was brave enough to enter a house where a possible vampire attack had occurred. It was probably the second one.

 

The house didn’t seem like it had been lived in recently. There was a very fine coating of dust on the nearby coffee table. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at night if it weren’t for me being a dhampir, but anyone could have seen it once the sun was up. Aside from that, there was a lack of… presence, I suppose. The house just didn’t feel like it was occupied. It felt empty. The smell of human was very old.

 

So, who had I seen moving passed the windows?

 

As lightly as I could, I started exploring the house. Everywhere I went, it was the same. A bit of dust, just enough to suggest neglect, and nothing else. There was no blood, no damage and no sign of any trouble at all; it was like the Nobs had just decided to walk out. That couldn’t have been right, though. The table was set for dinner, with a few bowls of congealed and rotting food in the center. Whatever had happened must have been just before they all sat down. Maybe just _as_ they sat down.

 

I was staring at that strangely disquieting scene when something above me made a board creak.

 

My head snapped up at the same moment that my adrenaline level started to rocket up again. _Bad_ thing. The nausea increased ten times over and I collapsed, retching helplessly. It wasn’t just my head this time; my entire body was freaking out because of it. My muscles started alternately cramping and spasming, and it was all I could do to curl up into a ball and keep breathing.

 

Even through all that, I could still maintain the level of rationality needed to know that the sounds coming down to me now meant that whoever was upstairs was moving and chances were they were moving towards the sounds I was making.

 

There was an almost-definite vampire victim in the house with me. Maybe they were even a full-fledged vampire by then. They were going to come down the stairs. They were going to find me curled up like a kicked puppy in front of the dining room table. They were, quite certainly, going to rip my throat out.

 

I couldn’t move a finger to defend myself!


	6. Breaking Point

I was gonna die.

 

I was gonna die and the next person to come into the house would find little chunks of Dualarc sticking to the walls and ceiling, with whatever was left of my skeleton scattered across the floor. They’d probably throw up all over the place (and all over _me_. Even if I would be a corpse and past caring, that would still be gross) and then call the sheriff. Hey, maybe I’d actually get a funeral. Even if they couldn’t patch me back up enough to stick me in a coffin, I’m sure someone in town had a jar they could use for cremation.

 

Of course, this was all in the future. The present consisted of me twitching on the floor from my own stupid body’s messed up chemical structure. Maybe it would have been better if I had never stopped taking the serum. There were human vampire Hunters, right? Of course, if I had kept taking my doses, then I never would have gotten all the benefits of vampire blood and I probably would have died on my first week out of Birch. Would that have been better than this?

 

Aaaand the footsteps had reached the ground floor. Shit. Shit, shit, _shit_.

 

Come on, Dualarc. You can do this. Just move your arm across the floor. You don’t even have to start pushing yourself up yet. Just unwrap your arm from around your stomach and get it moving.

 

Come on, move. Move, please. Please move, Mr. Arm? _Please_ move, you _stupid, useless limb!_

 

Then the dining room door on the other side of the table swung open and I realized I was going to die at the ripe old age of fifteen.

 

Except I didn’t, because it was D who came into the room.

 

Fear instantly became humiliation. If there was any sort of mercy in the universe, the table would hide me from view and he’d go on his merry way without ever knowing I was there.

 

(See, this was back when I still thought that the universe _had_ mercy).

 

Instead, he saw me the second he entered. Can you guess what happened? _Nothing_. He just stared at me for a second or two and then started walking again. He _stepped over me_ , like I was a sleeping dog.

 

Humiliation left. Fear left. Anger took up everything in me.

 

It wasn’t the dismissal that the action invoked, although it did sting horribly. It was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been following him with almost no words between us for fourteen days. During that time, most of the few words he did speak were some variation of “Get away from me” or “You are an idiot”. He didn’t want to train me? Fine, I could respect that. But what the _fuck_ gave him the right to ignore me like I was just part of the landscape? Why did he have to go out of his way during the road to this town to try and shake me off?

 

We were in a vampire’s territory and I was lying curled up on the floor of an abandoned house. If it wasn’t obvious that something was wrong with me, then I’d eat my damn shoes. Did he help me? Did he drag me to the hospital? _Did he even fucking ask me what was wrong?!_ No, of course not! I’m just a piece of teenage garbage lying in his path! God forbid he show some kindness, some _humanity!_

 

My eyes may have been glowing. I could certainly feel two unmentionable things that were razor sharp begin to slide down over my gums. The nausea increased as my vampire blood rose up, but it was swept away from consideration by the mindless, frothing ocean of rage that had taken hold of me.

 

_Screw_. _You_. Vampire Hunter D. _FUCK YOU WITH A REBAR!_

“… _bastard_ ….” I hissed weakly.

 

Behind me, the footsteps stopped.

 

“…what…th’ hell is… your pro… problem?!” I ground out my words between clenched teeth.

 

I was moving. Slowly and extremely painfully, but I was moving. The spasms and contractions had not stopped, but I wanted to hurt D more than anything else in the entire world. They didn’t matter compared to that. If making him bleed one little drop meant losing all my limbs, it would have been worth it just to know that for once _I_ was causing _him_ some pain, instead of the other way around.

 

I hated that cold freak.

 

God, I _hated_ him.

 

“You s-see… someone on th’ ground and… you jus’… _leave ‘em?!_ ” I spat.

 

I had gotten one arm beneath me and used it to push myself over. I could see D again and he was standing in front of the door I had entered from. He wasn’t moving, hadn’t even turned his head to see me, but he wasn’t leaving either.

 

“What is wrong with you? …You… don’t care about _anything!_ About anyone! Is it… because of being a Hunter? Or because you’re… a dhampir? Or… is it just… _you?!_ ”

 

All the feelings I’d been pushing away were floating to the surface like dead bodies. I could feel the sharp teeth of a vampire scraping against my tongue and lips as I spoke, but at the same time I also felt tears leaking into my ears and my throat starting to close up.

 

“I… I almost killed a girl tonight. That girl…Maribel, at the… hospital. I pulled her… away from the victims and then turned around and… and damn near bit her myself! It scared the fuck outta me, but… I’m glad. I’m _glad_ I was scared, because… it’d be better than feeling _nothing._ If being a Hunter means shutting everything else out, then I’ll find another way. I don’t wanna be like _you!_ ”

 

The pain and the spasms were fading away. The attack was ending and my body was almost feeling normal again. ‘Almost’ being the key word. I still had a monster of a headache and I was torn between the twin desires of bawling my eyes out or launching myself at D to tear out his throat.

 

Speaking of tall, dark and removed, he hadn’t made a sound during my whole stuttering tirade. He stood in the doorway and blocked the moonlight. It was as though he was sucking it all up and taking everything happy and joyful with it. It was a black figure of endless silence and mystery.

 

Was that what it meant to be a Hunter? To be so far removed from the rest of the world and all the people in it that you never felt their pain, never felt their determination, never felt their love? To give your life to the trade of death and never smile or laugh again?

 

Or was it the vampire blood in him that made him so untouchable? Was it something that would reach me someday, no matter what profession I chose?

 

No, some part of me whispered. It was the part that still caught frogs from ponds and tumbled down hillsides for a game of tag.

 

Please, dear God, _no_.

 

Don’t let me become that.

 

I acknowledged my claim to vampires when I gave up the serum, but I’d slit my own throat before I tossed aside my humanity.

 

“Would you really?”

 

I hadn’t realized I’d said that last part out loud until D responded to it.

 

He turned around when he spoke.

 

There was… something in his eyes, something that I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t condescending or angry. It was… sad, almost. Except it went deeper than that. Not pity, but something close to it. Weirdly enough, seeing it made the anger and hurt just drain out of me. Don’t ask me why.

 

We must have made a screwy picture. Him, the imposing Hunter. Me, the sprawled brat with fangs. Anyone walking in would have thought he was about to cut off my head.

 

Then he moved.

 

It was smooth and somehow totally silent. I wondered why that board had creaked overhead if he could move like that. He bent down and grabbed the back of my sweatshirt, then hauled me up to my feet. I was definitely not expecting this and I half fell back to the floor, but I managed to grab the edge of the dinner table and keep myself upright. The headache was making my legs weak, but I could stand as long as I held on.

 

Seeing D standing and close up was different. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t intimidating me or shooing me away or ignoring me and I finally saw that he actually wasn’t that much taller than me - only six or seven inches were between our respective heights. I’d probably be dead even with him when I finally finished growing.

 

If what I thought was true, then that wouldn’t be odd. Suddenly, though, I didn’t want it to be true. I wasn’t angry anymore, just tired of his very presence. If seeing D was a reflection of my own future, then I was ready to shatter the stupid mirror. This apple planned on falling very fucking far from the family tree.

 

And D was still giving me that unreadable look.

 

“What?” I finally asked.

 

He didn’t say anything. There was – and I’m not totally sure about this – the sense that he _wanted_ to say something, but it wouldn’t come out. But it only lasted for a second and even when he had been giving me that look, the mask that he always wore was still in place. It had just slid away ever-so-slightly. Then it came back like it had never left and Vampire Hunter D was gazing down at me, making me feel like old chewing gum he’d nearly gotten stuck to his boot.

 

“Next time, it may well be that someone other than myself comes across you when you are vulnerable. Take my advice and leave town. There are other Hunters, active or retired, who can each you, if you are truly so desperate to learn.”

 

Then he was gone, like a current of dark water.

 

I was left alone in a dark house that stank of loss and yet I didn’t feel anything other than slightly confused. That had been… well, okay, not _nice_. The world would burst into flames before D was nice to me, I was pretty sure of that. He’d hauled me off the floor nearly by the scruff of my neck and only after I’d bitched my heart out at him. However, it hadn’t been quite as brusque as his other dismissals.

 

And that look he had been giving me….

 

D….

 

…Maybe he didn’t….

 

….

 

….

 

….

 

…No. No _way_. What was I thinking? D was D, end of story.

 

Okay, I thought, break’s over.

 

If D was poking around here, it must mean he had some suspicions about this place. I wanted him to notice me, so I had to go figure out something useful.

 

Ideally, I wouldn’t collapse while I did it because, like D had said, it wasn’t only him who could find me trapped on floor.

 

* * *

 

 

D heard the boy start moving through the house behind him before the front door finished swinging shut. Whatever had kept him paralyzed on the floor seemed to have gone away, at least for the moment.

 

“You _really_ shouldn’t have done that, you know.”

 

That voice, terribly hoarse, was most definitely not that of a gorgeous dhampir.

 

“I mean, you had a perfect opportunity right there in front of you. The kid was crying and frustrated to the point of throwing in the towel. All it would have taken was a little, itty bitty push and he would have cracked.”

 

D opened the gate to the Nob house and passed through, letting it swing shut behind him.

 

“So, what happens instead? You let him get to you, like the big softy you are. That’s torn it, you know. Unless something drastic happens, it’s going to be _months_ before we get an opportunity like that again.”

 

“Be quiet,” D murmured. “He isn’t our problem. Can you find that dirt without assistance?”

 

“If it’s close enough, sure. If not, I’m going to need the big four.”

 

There had been fresh dirt, ever so faint, on the floor of Emily Nob’s bedroom. It had not been there the night before and D likely would have never returned to the house had he not seen something pale and inhuman racing toward it a few minutes earlier. It was gone by the time he arrived, but the dirt remained and it gave him a lead to follow. It carried traces of putrescines and cadaverines that came from bodies during decomposition. Essentially, graveyard soil.

 

As it turned out, the other _could_ trace the smell of soil back to the source and D set off immediately. All thoughts of the boy disappeared.

 

The night was fading and he had a job to do.


	7. Bondage Gear

So, where to start?

 

Well, D had been upstairs. Let’s start there.

 

I had to tackle the staircase steps one at a time, getting both feet on the same riser before moving on to the next and clutching the handrail like a lifeline in a storm. Damn, was this stupid withdrawal ever going to end? I get it, body. You aren’t happy with me. Now, seriously, will you shut the fuck up? So I’ve been going cold turkey on the serum. Big deal.

 

The second floor wasn’t any better than the first. It had the same creepy feeling of being abandoned at the last minute. I passed a little kid’s room and saw toys still scattered across the floor. There wasn’t anything inside the room of interest, though, and I kinda almost broke a leg when I stepped on a toy car and fell, but hey, I’m durable.

 

The master bedroom was just as useless (although there were some nice rings in Mrs. Nob’s jewelry box. …Don’t look at me like that. I was just investigating, yeah?). Two bathrooms yielded nothing and the study was nothing but books and dust. All that was left was a teenage girl’s room – Emily’s – and that was where I hit pay dirt.

 

Or graveyard dirt, as it turned out.

 

Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. All I saw was a stain on her carpet that was pretty fresh and smelled like flowers, rain, earth and something like rotting bodies. Don’t ask me to explain how I know what those smell like, okay? Bad memories there.

 

I didn’t know where that dirt had come from and I didn’t know where to start looking for the source. I could follow D’s smell easily enough because… well, he’s a freaking dhampir and even if I sucked at tracking through scent, there isn’t anything that smells enough like him to throw me off. Dirt is dirt, though. All it would take was passing by a flower shop or a river or any of the dirt roads that crisscrossed through the town and I’d be screwed. Damn.

 

I left the Nob house feeling both annoyed and nauseous. Not a pleasant combination. I hunkered down against the outside of the wall that encircled the lawn and wondered what to do next.

 

Going back to my shed for the night was always an option, but, stomach sickness and headache aside, I really didn’t feel that tired. Not to mention it would have felt like giving up.

 

_‘Okay Dualarc, think. You’re a thrall. You haven’t been caught yet and you don’t plan on changing that status anytime soon. Where do you go that can hide you? Where would you go that no one in this entire town, no one who has lived here for their entire life, would ever think to look? …Are you even still in the town? …No, no that can’t be right. If I was a bloodthirsty psychotic, I’d want to leave at least a few aces nearby in case I couldn’t get back to my stomping grounds in a hurry. This thing wants to stop the sheriff from displacing its buddies again, so no way would it take the risk of not leaving someone in town to keep an eye on things. So, where are they hiding?’_

 

I didn’t have a freaking clue.

 

I’d like to say that I pulled some awesome, genius answer from out of my ass and demonstrated that I was natural born Hunter, but that ain’t what happened. What happened was, I realized I had the choice of either going back to bed for the night, wandering around until morning or following D again.

 

I… really didn’t feel like seeing D again after our little chat in the dining room and, like I said earlier, I wasn’t tired.

 

So I wound up sitting against that wall for the next few hours until the sun rose and wondering over and over again what the hell I was doing there.

 

* * *

  

My headache and stomach cramps had more or less stopped by the time I finally got off that wall. A decent way to start the new day, I suppose. The massive upgrade to my senses was still there, but it was starting to become manageable. Who knew, maybe it would be my standard in a few days.

 

I walked back to the shed as people began filing out of their homes and going to school, work, friends’ homes, etc. Vampire or not, life had to go on. I really kind of hated them for that, even if the feeling only lasted a few seconds. I didn’t understand how they did it. These were the people who would weep, mourn and move on if they lost someone to a monster. These were the people who felt okay about asking someone else to take care of the problem for them. I… couldn’t be the same way. I could have hired a Hunter to track the bastard down, if I’d sold a lot of things, but it wouldn’t have been enough for me – I had to do the deed myself.

 

Obsessive much?

 

Maybe.

 

Okay, probably.

 

That doesn’t say much about my state of mind, does it?

 

I wish I could explain it. I’ve had a long time to think about what happened and what came after, but there still aren’t words to fully describe it all. I can’t explain what it’s like to come home from my friend’s house and see the door that I knew should be shut against the cold standing wide open. I can’t explain what it’s like to run into my own home and see everything in perfect condition, except for my own mother. I can’t explain about the two days and nights of insanity that followed while I waited up for the bastard with a stake and a knife by my side.

 

I can’t… Well, I just can’t.

 

Anyway, enough of that.

 

I reached the shed around six-thirty in the morning. My bag hadn’t been touched, which confirmed my theory about the shed – no one had been using it for quite a while. Lacking any better options, I curled up for a nap. I still wasn’t tired, but I didn’t really have any other idea of what to do. I figured it wouldn’t hurt my headache, either.

 

As it turns out, I was right. I woke up around eleven and felt tons better. The imbalance in my body had finally fixed itself and I didn’t feel like killing myself anymore. I left the shed actually thinking that maybe the day wouldn’t be so bad.

 

The first thing on my to-do list was to head out to the forest. The sun was up, so whatever control the vampire had over its creatures was probably weaker. An hour or two hunting and scavenging for parts and plants that I could sell for some money would be worth it if it kept me from going hungry again when D left town. If his previous pace was anything to go by, I wouldn’t be able to spare a minute doing it once we hit the road.

 

Luckily, I didn’t have to go very far. There were some plants growing right near the edge of the forest that would get me a decent sum back in town. If the townspeople hadn’t been so scared to go outside the town walls, they would have almost certainly been picked already, so apparently even vampires can have their good points. If it wasn’t for that bloodsucker, I would have been asking people if they needed their windows washed.

 

The problems came after I started back and by “problems” I mean a family of very grumpy solar wolves. Think of vicious, little, solar powered, glowing lapdogs and you’ll have a good idea of what they look like. Why they earned the name solar _wolves_ is beyond me, because the yappy little things don’t even come up past my knee and I’m still growing.

 

They are dangerous, though. See, they can take in the sun’s energy and focus it into laser beams that erupt from their mouths and no, I’m not making this up. They are walking, breathing ray guns that come in groups of five to nine members each.

 

So, I’m walking back to town with my pockets full of flora and then I’m jumping into the nearest tree, while the ground I was standing on bursts into flames. Sparing the gory details, I spent the next two minutes frantically jumping and dodging to and from every tree in a half a mile radius, never staying in one place very long because it would inevitably be incinerated. I killed four of them before the rest of the pack got the message and pulled back, throwing out high pitched growls in my direction.

 

I was actually happy they had shown up, though I could have gone without the trying to kill me part. The skin from solar wolves is worth a pretty penny, because it’s used for repairing solar panels which are a pretty big source of energy these days. I pulled my knife out of my bag and started skinning the carcasses.

 

The fact that each of my four prizes had two puncture wounds on their necks didn’t detract from their value.

 

* * *

 

 

I’ve mentioned this before, but being a dhampir can really suck sometimes. The shopkeeper gave me only half – _half_ , and only after I’d haggled for almost twenty minutes – what he would have given anyone else for what I’d brought him. I was right about the skins still being useful even with the vampire bites in them, though he’d gone pretty white after I told him they’d attacked me not three minutes from the town gate. I guess they hadn’t been that close before.

 

So, the vampire was starting to close in the town? Couldn’t blame him. The dimension displacers would be arriving pretty soon. He was probably hoping to catch the deputies returning with them while they were still in the forest.

 

My monetary problems taken care of, I went looking for D again.

 

I didn’t really want to. Last night’s… whatever it was, was still pretty fresh in my memory. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t make a comment about it, but it was D. I had already learned he didn’t need to say anything to make me feel like a bug. Besides, I wanted to know what he’d found in the Nob house.

 

It didn’t take long to find him once I started asking around. He’d gone into the cemetery the night before. The last person to see him had been the groundskeeper, who had unlocked a particular mausoleum for D and then watched him go down the stairs without so much as a candle. So I went to the cemetery.

 

It had definitely seen better days. The grounds were well maintained, but the gravestones themselves were worn down things, even the ones from only five or six years ago. I guessed they had harsh weather during the cold season. The fence was starting to sag and the flowers left all over the place couldn’t quite keep the smell of rotting bodies from reaching my nose. Yet another instance where being a dhampir sucks. On the bright side, I now knew where the dirt in Emily Nob’s bedroom had come from.

 

The groundskeeper was a sodden drunk, but he showed me to the right mausoleum easily enough. I think he’d been there for a while. The door was still open and I could faintly smell D’s scent leading down into the shadows.

 

“He went down around seven hours ago,” the old man mumbled. “Ain’t yet come back.”

 

“I’m gonna see what’s taking him so long. Thanks for showing me the way, old timer,” I said and then started down the stairs.

 

My eyes adjusted to the gloom easily enough. What I saw was predictable and creepy. About two dozen stone sarcophagi laid in rows that stretched all the way to the back of the crypt, where a hole had been punched through the wall. It looked like something had tunneled through the dirt and then burst through the twelve inches of rock like they were nothing at all. Something like a vampire, maybe?

 

It was pretty clear that D had gone into the tunnel, even without me following his scent. There wasn’t any other way out of the crypt, but the stairs. The tunnel was dark, almost darker than my eyes could deal with, but I was able to make do, not that it mattered much. I only got about twenty yards in when I heard someone coming from ahead of me. Footsteps first, then breathing and then a faint heartbeat, but I’d figured out who it was long before it reached that point.

 

D materialized out of the shadow like something from a horror movie and even though I knew he was coming, it still scared me.

 

Shut up. The man is creepy.

 

D looked at me, looked through me and then moved on.

 

_‘Well, at least he isn’t bringing up last night,’_ I thought.

 

I turned around and followed him out of the tunnel. Now that he was out, I didn’t actually have to go down there myself. Surely he would let me have a few bits of information, right?

 

“So, did you find Emily Nob down there?”

 

Holy crap, I was questioning D. Somebody wake me up.

 

“Go away.”

 

(Well, who didn’t see that coming?)

 

“It’s a simple question,” I grinned, trying to loosen the atmosphere. We were underground in a crypt with dead people and he didn’t like me, so it didn’t work. “Yes or no?”

 

“Yes. Now, go away.”

 

“Was she the only one down there?”

 

We had reached the entrance to the mausoleum by then. The grounds keeper turned dead white when he saw D striding out of the dark. I kept following D through the cemetery.

 

“I kind of doubt she was,” I rambled on. Hey, it was either that or walk in silence and, lest you forget, me and him had been doing that for a while now. “I don’t know much more than anyone else about this stuff (there’s a little hint for you, by the way), but if they remember anything from before they got bit, I’d say the whole family is still sticking together. Living in a hole in the ground alone sucks more than when you’re living in a hole with others. At least, that’s I think.”

 

Still more silence.

 

At least the birds were singing.

 

“I smell some vampire blood on you. I’m guessing that’s vampire blood, anyway. So, did any of them get away or did you get all of them? Wait, what I’m I saying? You’re the great Hunter; of course you got all of them. Of course, the fact that they all managed to completely turn probably means the other missing people have as well and unless they were hiding down there too, you’ve got hunt down at least one more hiding place before their boss starts getting _really_ busy.”

 

He didn’t say anything. He just kept walking towards the town gate we had first entered through two days ago.

 

“Hey, D,” I nagged.

 

And whatever I was going to ask got pushed out of my mind by the sudden realization that I kind of hated this bastard and I wanted to irritate him right the hell back.

 

What followed next was a brief debate on whether or not petty revenge was worth the potential cost of being maimed. Then again, I reasoned, he had been having me lurk around him for a while now and he’d never actually hurt me. Left me to fend for myself, yes, ignored me, yes, insulted me, hell yes, but he’d never really tried to force me away. So, if I didn’t have to worry about getting thrashed and if the most embarrassing moment had already been used up last night, did that mean I no longer had anything to worry about in the death and dismemberment department when it came to D?

 

Well, there was certainly a way of finding out.

 

If I was right, his tolerance towards me was higher than I thought. If I was wrong….

 

…Er, let’s not go there, shall we?

 

“Hey, D,” I said cheerfully. “I was wondering – about how long does it take you to strap on all that bondage gear each morning?”

 

He stopped like he’d run into a wall.

 

He wouldn’t kill me. He had me alone and helpless the last night, he hadn’t tried to kill me and he’d even (sort of) helped me. So, he probably wouldn’t kill me, no matter what I said. I was statistically likely to live through the next few seconds. He would not kill me. He. Would. Not. Likely. Kill. Me.

 

Probably.

 

D turned around and looked down into my eyes.

 

‘ _…He is gonna kill me.’_

 

It distantly occurred to me that apologizing and running away would drastically lengthen my lifespan.

 

“…Because, you know, all those buckles and zippers must take a lot of time.”

 

Yeah, I don’t know how I’ve survived this long either.

 

I found myself longing for the earlier silence. This new silence was a creepy kind, more commonly found on execution grounds than brightly lit town streets.

 

“Stop ignoring me,” I ordered. My voice was quaking, but it was still an order. “Insult me if you want, but _stop ignoring me_.”

 

“You want me to stop ignoring you?” D asked.

 

His tone was as bland as ever, but even I could hear the threat behind it: _kid, you do **not** want me to stop ignoring you. If I can’t ignore you, I’ll have to hurt you. _

 

But you know what? Fuck it.

 

“Yes,” I hissed. “I do. If you don’t want to train me, fine, I’ll change your mind, but stop treating me like I’m an ant crawling on your boot.”

 

“An ant knows better than to go near something that can kill it,” D said coldly. “You don’t seem to be that intelligent.”

 

I could feel my teeth grinding together, my two upper canines starting to poke into my lower gums, and D, just standing there, looking so fucking _better than me_ \-- !!

 

That was when the other deputy, Blondie’s partner, ran around the corner huffing and puffing like a set of bagpipes. Damn, the sheriff needed to whip that guy into shape. The deputy slid to a halt a few feet away from D and started talking a mile a minute.

 

“You, Hunter! Getch’yerself over ta the gate double time! The displacement units’er here and we’ve gotta set ‘em up a.s.a.p.!”

 


	8. The Hoodie Dies

Going above and beyond everyone’s expectations and spitting in the face of Murphy’s Law, the deputies the sheriff had sent out arrived back with the dimensional displacers a full half day before anyone expected them. There was still plenty of time to set them up in the daylight, which was the highest priority.

 

When D and I finally arrived at the town gate, all of the deputies were crowding around the sheriff and chomping at the bit to get into the forest. They wanted their nice, peaceful town back to the way it was and the vampire who had been harassing them turned to dust.

 

“Good, you’re finally here,” the sheriff said as D walked up to him. “We’ve finally got the units and we’re heading out to set them up now. I want you to follow and take care of any trouble that springs up.”

 

“The vampire won’t emerge in daylight,” D said quietly. “The only things you’ll have to worry about are the animals it has enslaved.”

 

“Yeah, well, that’s still something to worry about,” the sheriff pressed. “Having one more fighter out there to watch our backs while we switch out the new units with the old ones won’t hurt.”

 

“Two,” I corrected.

 

The sheriff looked down at me from his mechanical horse, staring as though he had forgotten I existed. “Pardon?”

 

“Two more fighters,” I explained. “I’m going with him.”

 

The sheriff blinked and looked to D for confirmation. I guess he was remembering D’s earlier revelation that he didn’t actually want me around.

 

D himself didn’t bat an eye. “Drive the boy off, if you want. I don’t care.”

 

Apparently neither did the sheriff. Saving his town ranked higher than messing with me on his To Do list.

 

There was a five minute wait as D went back to get his horse and then we were all off for the woods.

 

* * *

 

 

So, here was the plan:

 

Of the seven displacement units that had originally been set up, only two were left. The sheriff had buried them somewhere within the forest to hide them without removing the displacement field. Our intent today was to dig up those two units and transfer their software (or whatever it was that they used to mess with space. I’m not a techie, okay?) to the seven new units, which would be activated while the old units were simultaneously deactivated. There was an automatic timer set up for that, because some sort of black hole catastrophe would happen if two identical displacement fields were set up at the same time.

 

Once the timer had been set, the deputies would need to get the new units to their positions as soon as possible. Anything less than perfection would result in an unstable field that would sooner or later collapse, and then the whole mess would start over again. They didn’t want to be too generous with the time limit, figuring that the longer they stood around in the woods, the better the chance of something killing them and/or destroying a unit. One hour was the chosen limit and in that hour, all seven deputies would be running in a group through the forest. Once they reached their designated spot, one of them would set up the unit and dig himself in to hold out while the group started on again without him. We would swing in a wide circle around the area that used to hold Skethagen and the last unit would mean the completion of the circle.

 

Between digging up the old units and activating the new ones, it was likely that we’d get some unpleasant company. This was where D was supposed to come in.

 

The deputies would have a problem fighting and guarding the units at the same time; the darn things were the size of a large watermelon and twice as heavy. Once they’d been set up, the deputy left behind could guard it easily, but while they were moving, D was their best defense.

 

(And me, but I wasn’t really the guy they were relying on, remember?)

 

It was essentially a race to set up the units before we were overwhelmed, and no, I’m not exaggerating. God alone knew how many animals and monsters that vampire had subverted in the weeks it had been prowling the forest. Even I could tell it was a _bad_ plan, but we didn’t have a lot of time to make up something better.

 

The odd thing was, in spite of the nervousness that made my stomach churn, racing into the forest alongside the horses also gave me a definite feeling of excitement.

 

_‘Does this mean I’m finally losing my mind? …Eh, probably.’_

 

* * *

 

 

The forest around the town (did it even have a name? I can’t remember…) was a thick, gnarly old bastard, with trees that blocked out most of the sunlight and little chattering things that lunged back into the shadows whenever we passed by. Nobody paid them any mind unless they started going after us. We had only a few hours left until the sun went down and then we’d all be totally screwed.

 

The first unit went up about a mile off the road we had entered on. It only took a minute to dig up the old one, transfer the whatever-it-was to the new one, and bury the thing and then one deputy had set up a portable Gatling gun, some self-firing flamethrowers and a few grenades to keep him company until the rest of the units were in place. I did not envy his job. Since he was no longer using it, I helped myself to his horse. No one seemed to care enough to stop me, though I was willing to bet that would change once we were out of danger.

 

After that, we _really_ started moving. There was only an hour until the timer kicked in. Naturally, that was when the first of the really troublesome monsters started coming after us. I’m pleased to say I drew the first blood on our expedition. A killer flying squirrel (no, I’m not making this up – _they exist_ ) launched itself at the sheriff and I moved to intercept it. My steel-knuckled gloves shattered half the bones in its body and it hit the ground with a gross, wet ‘thump’.

 

More, scarier things start pouring through the trees. We never stopped moving, not once, which is why I now know how to fight on horseback. F.Y.I., don’t use your feet because the horse gets confused.

 

The next four units were all set up with enough yelling and gunshots to deafen me, but no real trouble. D was the reason for that. He – killed – _everything_ – that came at us. I almost think the posse could have left their guns at home. Almost.

 

Of course, it couldn’t go entirely to plan. We were five-sixths of the way done, with the group consisting of just me, D and the sheriff, when things got interesting in a really bad way.

 

(Don’t they always?)

 

* * *

  

It started with a scream.

 

I knew that scream and so did the sheriff.

 

I wasn’t all that surprised when he yanked his horse hard to the left and started barreling through the trees towards the source. I _was_ fairly surprised when D stopped him.

 

“Move!” The sheriff ordered.

 

“If you go now, the displacement will fail completely,” D deadpanned. Did the man have no other tone of voice?

 

_“That’s my effing niece, you cold-blooded - !”_

 

“The boy will go with you,” D continued without pause, maybe because he was used to having people yell at him. “I will take care of the girl.”

 

_‘I’m sorry, **now** you want my help?’ _

“Like hell I’m leavin’ my niece in yer hands!”

 

“Whatever took her, I’m more likely to take care of it than you,” D said, and seriously, I was starting to think he didn’t know what tact was. “Finish the displacement. We will find you when it is done.”

 

He kicked his horse into a gallop and took off through the trees, heading for the source of the scream.

 

The sheriff spent a long moment looking after him and then cursed. He wheeled his horse around and kicked it into motion towards the final stop. I did the same, trying to keep up with him and not kill my mount by riding into a tree. The monsters behind us had nearly caught up, the little lead we had had on them now almost entirely gone. It was going to be a real party when we stopped.

 

Although the sun was still in the sky, the thick foliage prevented most of the light from reaching through to us. I could see fine, but the sheriff nearly killed himself more than once on the way. He was halfway into the clearing he’d pointed out on the map as the sixth point when he finally stopped and literally threw himself off of the horse.

 

“Keep ‘em busy!” He yelled at me while he started digging.

 

Easier said than done.

 

There were monsters pouring out of the trees and dashing towards me and the sheriff. I got off the horse in a hurry (no way was I doing this without my own feet) and it bolted, proving that mechanical horses do, in fact, possess brains. With the sheriff behind me and the two horses fleeing, the monsters started swarming me. I could have beaten any of them one on one, maybe any five of them before I started worrying, but this? _Hell._ I killed one and ten more took its place.

 

I don’t remember the exact specifications of the fight, mostly because the whole damn thing was a big, violent blur. I cracked the skull of a man-eating boar and jumped away from the claws of a giant mantis, then stepped in to shatter its chest with a punch, then jumped back to the sheriff to high kick the sasquatch that was closing in on him and then hurled a rock at a giant spider with enough force to dent steel, then tossed a wolf into a plasma beast so it would have something else to focus on for a few seconds, and so on and so forth.

 

It was like a martial arts marathon without the fun. Over and over again I kept thinking _how fucking long does it take to bury a displacement unit?!_ and _why did no one notice that the entire monster population is under a vampire’s control until recently?!_ That was what it felt like – like every single monster within a hundred miles had had the misfortune to be made into a thrall. The damn things just _would not stop coming!_

 

“Hurry up, damn it!” I yelled.

 

“I am!” The sheriff yelled back from behind me.

 

Well, he wasn’t hurrying enough. I’d been pushed back further and further, working around him in a circle to keep all sides covered, but it wasn’t working. The circle just kept getting smaller and smaller. I’d be on top of him pretty soon and so would the monsters.

 

My clothes were in tatters and I had blood up to my elbows. My own mother probably wouldn’t have recognized me, so it was a big surprise that D did when he came riding in to save the day.

 

Maribel was draped over his horse like a sack. D had his sword out and everything within five feet of him was either dead or dying when he finally joined up with us.

 

Things got slightly easier after that. I no longer had to spin around like a wind up toy to keep all my bases covered. D took half the circle and I got the other half, and between the two of us the sheriff had a nice little ten foot circle to work in. There were things like bone and blood raining down on him every few seconds, but it could have been worse.

 

It couldn’t have been very long before the sheriff shouted “Done!” and picked up his gun to start helping us out. The attack was even less problematic after that. Maybe they were finally running low on numbers or maybe they somehow knew we had completed our task, because the monsters began thinning out. Within a few minutes, I was taking a breather next to D’s horse while he ever so calmly jumped and dodged around the clearing on foot with the sheriff and dealt with the last few stragglers. Then there was one final _shwing!_ of D’s sword and we were done.

 

Yay.

 

The sheriff holstered his gun and jogged to Maribel, pulling her off the saddle and holding her to his chest. It was really kind of sad. He was mostly a jerk to me the whole time I’d known him, but you didn’t need to be a genius to see that he really loved his family.

 

Me on the other hand….

 

“Hey. Did you get it?” I asked D.

 

“Yes.”

 

Something had grabbed Maribel out of town in broad daylight. Unless they were seriously hard core vampires with some nasty tricks to them, it wasn’t one of the Nobility.

 

“Well, what was it? And don’t give me the silent treatment.”

 

D just gave me that look, that flat D look, but for some reason he decided to go easy on me. “It was the victims. They somehow escaped from the hospital, kidnapped the girl and followed us out here.”

 

Oh.

 

… _Oh._

 

Shit. Maribel was the only he’d brought back. Did that mean….

 

“What about the victims?” I asked, feeling queasy. “Did you kill them?”

 

D would… he might have done so. The guy did not look at death like I did, I’d learned that within a day of meeting him, but would he really have just slaughtered all those people when they’d been mindless slaves to the real enemy?

 

“No,” D answered.

 

Tension that I had not known I felt left me in a rush.

 

D walked back to his horse and mounted, wheeling the beast over to the sheriff, who was still cradling Maribel.

 

“Get on your horse,” D ordered. “I need help to get all of the victims back before the field is replaced.”

 

“I’m not leaving Maribel here,” the sheriff growled.

 

“The boy can take her back. As it is, there are less than eight minutes until the dimensional displacement field is replaced and your daughter is lying right in its path. I cannot carry all of the victims out on my horse alone and as the sheriff, they are your responsibility – “

 

“ _I am not leaving my niece alone with a dhampir!_ ”

 

Um, okay. Ouch.

 

Remember how I said I was getting used to being a dhampir and getting flack for it? Well, I’m not entirely immune just yet.

 

“For fuck’s sake!” I snapped. “I’m not gonna bite her or feel her up or nothing! Go get your fucking daughter back and I’ll take Maribel back to town so you don’t have to worry about her and I swear she’ll be perfectly fine when we get there!”

 

If I’d planned on doing any of that to her, I would have tried it when I’d snuck into her bedroom that night before. Mostly the feeling up part, if I didn’t think she would have killed me for it. However, dhampir or human, there are some things you just don’t say to a man who outweighs you by at least eighty pounds.

 

“If I did try anything, _he_ ,” I pointed at D, “would cut off my head faster than I could blink! Okay?!”

 

“It’s the truth,” D finally spoke. “If his vampire nature appears, I will hunt him like any other.”

 

…You know looking back on it that scares me a whole lot more now then it did at the time.

 

“See?” I pressed on. “No worries. Go help your kid, idiot.”

 

The last word was a mistake, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. Neither was the sheriff, which is probably why he didn’t shoot me. As it was, he ever so carefully lowered Maribel to the grassy forest covering and reached for his horse’s reins. Then, right before he stepped into the saddle, he turned around and gave me the single stoniest glare I had ever received (from a human).

 

“Boy,” he drawled. “If even a hair on her head is out of place when I get back, I will kill you.”

 

“Got it. Now get going,” I retorted.

 

The sheriff snorted, spent a second or two visibly wondering if maybe plugging me full of missiles wasn’t the better option, and then mounted his horse. D just gave me another blank glance and then he was heading into the thick trees at a gallop, the sheriff hot on his heels.

 

I waited until I couldn’t hear their horses anymore and then I sighed, picked up Maribel and scrambled back onto my borrowed horse. It did not care for the extra burden. Well, tough shit, buddy. I’m not having a great day either.

 

The ride back to town was uneventful, save that I got lost twice. Those old forest are confusing, okay? We still managed to beat the rest of the group. Not one of the deputies, the sheriff or D had arrived ahead of us. I was only slightly worried because A) now that the units were in place (and the dimensional displacement had certainly happened by then) there was no more reason to try to attack the humans, B) I was pretty sure only an act of God could off D and C) I didn’t really like any of the bastards that much anyway, so there.

 

Some volunteer militia personnel had taken up guard posts around the gate to town. When they saw me coming in with Maribel sitting unconscious in front of me, it took a great deal of fast talking to convince them that I was not the one they should shoot. Once that was done, they took Maribel off to the hospital, took the horse off my hands (rather, from under my butt) and left me to my own devices, which weren’t that exciting. Because I had nothing to do. At all.

 

Skethagen was safely tucked away again, the units were buried so no one could find them (probably) and D would likely return soon to take the head vampire’s… well, head. This left me with nothing to do, but hang around the hospital and wait for Maribel to wake up.

 

What? I had promised to look after her.

 

…Okay, fine. She was the only person in the whole town who kind of didn’t hate me.

 

And she was sort of cute.

 

Hey, I’m a teenage boy. Sue me.

 

Thankfully, the nurse behind the desk was the same one from last night. She remembered me fondly as ‘that boy who saved Maribel from being eaten by her cousin’ and gave me a visitor’s pass for the day. That, combined with the single lonely flower I had picked from a vacant garden, helped dispel some of the troublemaker image that floated around me, although I did still get some stares.

 

I personally blame my hoodie. It’s seen better days since I started traveling.

 

The doctors could find nothing wrong with Maribel; she just appeared to be deeply unconscious. However, when it comes to vampires, everything is suspect and so they had placed her into one of the observation wards reserved for dangerous cases. It was only one vault door away from being a vampire victim ward. Maribel, now in an off-white hospital dressing gown with the bed sheets pulled up to her chest, looked three years younger and a lot less snappish. If I hadn’t thought she would wake up and crack me over the head with her bedpan, I might have tried kissing her.

 

An hour passed and then another. I figured it was a safe bet that the sheriff and D would get back at the same time. When four hours had passed and there was still no sign of the sheriff, that was when I started getting worried. Added to that worry was the fact that the sun had finally gone down. Wherever he was, our mystery vampire was up and about. Since he had already gone after Maribel twice I began twitching at every odd noise I heard and wishing that I had brought something more dangerous than my fighting gloves.

 

Five hours after I arrived at the hospital, I was ready to climb the walls. Where the hell was D?

 

I had begun picking the little yellow petals of the flower I had brought for Maribel and they were scattering all over the floor.

 

“He’ll teach me.”

 

Pluck.

 

“He won’t teach me.”

 

Pluck.

 

“He’ll teach me.”

 

Pluck.

 

“He won’t teach me.”

 

Pluck.

 

“He’ll teach – “

 

_Scritch._

 

There. Beyond the wall to the right of Maribel. No, more like _behind_ the wall. A tiny, soft skittering sound, not unlike a rat, but… not a rat. I was sure of that. The little alarm in my head that always began ringing when something creepy was happening suddenly woke up and informed me in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of Maribel’s room. This was something I could totally agree on, except my legs didn’t feel the same way. They moved me to stand up and face the wall hiding the whatever-it-was that had made that noise.

 

I didn’t have long to wait.

 

Slowly, a tiny piece of the wall pushed out. Then it stopped. Then it started again. Then it stopped. Then it started again and I could see the tip of a very sharp claw cutting through the titan-grade plaster of the room. There were tiny red flecks clinging to the claw and at first I thought they were blood, then maybe rot of some kind, but then the claw worked its way through the plaster, followed by four others, which were followed by five fingers, and I knew that they were what was left of Granny Zefula’s nail polish.

 

 _‘Oh **fuck**_.’

 

I jumped over Maribel and landed between her and the wall, with my feet touching the floor at the exact moment old lady Zefula decided to do away with any pretense of stealth and just bust through the wall like that giant talking jar I once saw in an old hologram track.

 

I tried not to think while I dashed forward and swung a fist into her face. Thinking would remind me that I was once again in a small hospital room with a homicidal maniac bearing down on me and defenseless, useless Maribel behind me. Thinking would remind me that while a victim might have some vampire traits, they were still human at the end of the day and I had a good chance of beating them. Thinking would remind me that a dhampir going against a true, fully turned vampire without any blades, torches or stakes had a significantly smaller chance of victory.

 

Mostly I just tried not to think because recent history showed that I wasn’t good at it.

 

Zefula reeled back after my punch, but even as she did, her hands blurred and latched around my extended wrist. The bitch dragged me down with her and started _squeezing_. Did I mention she had clawed her way through titan-grade plaster with those hands? Fucking ow, man.

 

I was kind of screaming when my free hand said ‘hello, how are ya’ to Zefula’s nose. Twice. She loosened her grip trying to grab my other hand and that let me yank free and scramble back onto my feet.

 

I got a good look at her during that period. The undead night life had not been kind to the old woman. Her skin, which I’d bet was pretty wrinkly to begin with, had started sagging disgustingly around her chin, eyes and ears. Let’s talk about the eyes and ears for a moment. Her eyes had gone bloody, less so from burst capillaries and more so because her irises had become a literally glowing scarlet. Her ears were now pointy, gaining a good inch to their tips and there was a mass of grey hair emerging from each ear canal. Gross. The claws were the worst, though. They even beat out the fangs poking from between her lips for sheer ‘holy shit’ effect. Most Frontier women keep their nails short out of practicality and I’m betting Zefula had been no different. Now? Now they were, I kid you not, _two-inch long talons_ that looked like they could spear through my eyes and reach my brain with no difficulty whatsoever.

 

She seemed to believe the same thing, because she jumped towards me with a yell and brought those claws up in a savage swing that would doubtless have blinded me (or worse) had I not ducked and kicked. She went flying back to crash into the wall, but I didn’t follow, being too busy looking around for something, _anything_ , that I could use to stab her through the heart.

 

Seriously, I was in a hospital! Where were all the scalpels when I needed one? As Zefula pried herself out of the dent she’d made, I was ripping open the cabinets that lined the far wall of Maribel’s room looking for anything pointy enough to shove through a vampire’s chest. The closest I got to a stake was a set of injection needles that shattered under my grip when, in my frantic grab to get them out, I forgot that most things aren’t meant to stand up to a dhampir’s strength, particularly not when he’s having a full blown panic attack.

 

_‘I am utterly screwed.’_

 

I had to settle for ripping one of cabinet doors off and smashing the vampire over the head with it when she closed in on me. That had absolutely no effect and I quickly found myself using both of my hands to keep both of hers away, in addition to planting a foot on her chest to stave off her fangs. The bitch was getting bitey.

 

I was pressed up against a wall, wondering the hell all the doctors were and why hadn’t they come to investigate the unholy noise I’d been making, and then Zefula (should I really call her that? She wasn’t the old lady Zefula that Maribel had known, that was for damn sure) swung her body to right while pushing forward. My leg, the only thing keeping her from sinking her fangs into my throat, slipped off of her.

 

And as for what happened next….

 

Everyone thinks about it at some point: what does the Dark Kiss feel like? There are stories at both ends. In some, it’s the worst pain imaginable. You scream for it to end, you scream for death, you scream for rescue, you scream for _anything_ , anything at all, to take the pain away. In others, it’s the greatest pleasure in the universe. Even the strongest will, the noblest spirit, will wane and falter when those fangs break the skin. You never want it to end and it doesn’t matter that it’s killing you or turning you into a vampire or that your own family may kill you for it. Your entire world narrows down to that one spot where the blood is flowing out of you and nothing else matters.

 

Maybe it depends on the vampire or maybe it depends on the person. I’m not sure and I really don’t care.

 

But just to let you know, in my case it was pain.

 

She hit me hard enough to smash my head against the wall and dent the plaster that can survive a meeting with a flamethrower. My tongue was caught between my teeth and I could taste blood. Somewhere, the tiny corner of my mind that sensei had successfully trained against any fear or panic said “Oh, shit. Not again.” The rest of me went into overdrive.

 

_‘Her fangs in me **her fangs in me** she’s sucking my blood I feel it get her out GET HER OFF GET HER OFF GET HER OFF!!!’ _

 

It _hurt_. It almost made my serum withdrawals look like paradise in comparison. I thought my neck was going to split open.

 

My hands, which Zefula had pinned against the wall, tore loose from her grip like she was a child. I grabbed her and _pushed_.

 

She flew through across the room. And into the wall. And then through the wall, making a second hole that I’m sure the janitorial staff would have my head for. She was screaming while she went and there was nothing human in the sound. It was the sound of an angry animal that had been denied its food.

 

I collapsed where I was, sliding down the wall and coming to a rest next to the little wooden table by Maribel’s bed. My head was spinning, my stomach couldn’t decide whether to eat itself or vacate the premises, my neck _hurt_ and I suddenly wanted to cry even worse then I had the night before.

 

It wasn’t fear that made me feel this way. This bitch was not going to kill me.

 

‘ _I’m not dying yet no way not until **he’s** dead first he killed her I have to avenge her avenge mom I’m not dying yet damn it.’_

 

I was mad to the point of tears because after all those years of martial arts lessons, all that hell I went through the week mom died, all those months of scouring the Frontier and looking for a man as elusive as the wind, all those nights of sleeping on pins and needles so I wouldn’t wake up in something’s stomach, all those monsters I had to face in the middle of nowhere with no help but what I got from my own two fists, all those days of wandering without a soul but my own, all those people looking down on me or hating me out right because of _what I was_ , all those rip-offs and attacks, all those challenges and struggles, all those things I had to learn the hard way, all those things that knocked me down and that I crawled back up from; I got through all of that and _this was what my limit was?! THIS?!_

I was being smacked around by a single. _Newborn. HAG?!_

What the FUCK was wrong with me?! I was this weak?! I expected to kill a vampire lord and I couldn’t even handle a bloodsucking spinster?!

 

Fuck this, fuck her, fuck _EVERYTHING!_ I’d kill her if I had to rip out her heart with my own two hands!

 

Snarling, I stood back up. The pain didn’t matter, not when I had that much raw anger in me. I started forward again, my left hip bumping the small table as I stood. I started stomping toward the new hole in the wall, which opened into the hallway behind it. Zefula would be getting up soon and I needed to pin her down before….

 

…Table.

 

A _wooden_ table.

 

_‘Oh my God, I am an utter **idiot**.’ _

I turned back around and cracked my heel over the tabletop with an axe kick. It was a one-legged piece of furniture and my strike split it right down the middle. I grabbed one half and savagely tore off the remaining portion of the table top. New tool in hand, I stepped past Maribel’s bed and ducked through the hole in the wall.

 

While checking for the vampire I saw that she had gone through the next wall in addition to the one I had just passed. I stepped through that hole and found myself in another isolation room, Zefula squirming on the floor beneath another massive dent in the far wall. I stopped a few feet away from her and spent a moment staring at the absolutely bizarre sight she was giving me.

 

The vampire that had nearly torn my throat out was writhing on the floor in complete agony. A high whine was coming out of her throat in an endless wave. Bloody froth dripped from her lips and her claws were scrabbling all over the floor, peeling up strips of linoleum.

 

My first thought was, _there was still some serum in my blood and she got it._ But that couldn’t be right. I had not had a dose in almost two weeks and whatever little remnants may have remained were surely burned out after the excitement of the past two days. However, I could not think of anything else that would have affected her like that.

 

_‘Why am I thinking about this now? Does it matter?’_

 

Thanks Inner Dualarc. Good point you have there.

 

I kicked her onto her back, straddled her chest and, as hard as I could, slammed the broken end of the table leg into her left breast.

 

There were some pretty spectacular results.

 

A massive geyser of blood, more than enough to spray all over the ceiling and wall, fountained up from the wound. It wasn’t good blood, either. Okay, I know that sounds gross, but remember who you’re talking to. This stuff had probably been sitting in her veins since she died. It was black, rank and coagulated. It seemed more like something you’d find in a sewer than a body. It also got _all over me_.

 

In addition to that totally unwelcome shower, Zefula’s body also had one more surprise for me. The moment the impromptu stake pierced through her chest, her body began to shrivel. The skin that had been sagging so grotesquely tightened until she looked like an old mummy and then it tightened some more. Her teeth fell out of her gums and into her throat. Her eyes fell out of the sockets and into her skull. Her gray hair fell out of her scalp in one big clump. Her ears curled inward like burning paper.

 

But what was best of all, what was the ten cent prize in the cereal box, was that the bitch lived just long enough to grab me while I was reeling away from the rotting, sodden mess she had become and drag me forward with enough force to break the blunt end of the table leg sticking my way and send it piercing through my right breast.

 

Two things managed to get through my higher brain functions before I finally passed out:

 

1) When I wake up, D had better still be in town.

 

2) That’s the end of this hoodie.


	9. The Score

I woke up feeling somewhat surprised that I waking up.

 

I mean, yeah, that vampire hadn’t gotten my heart, but I’d still been speared through the chest. You might hope to live through something like that, but you generally don’t think you actually will. All things considered, it was one of the nicer surprises I’d gotten that week.

 

I opened my eyes and Maribel was the first thing I saw. She was still in the hospital gown, but now she was sitting upright in chair that could have been the twin of the one I had been in not too long ago. I guess the hospital bought them in bulk.

 

“How’re you feeling?” Maribel asked.

 

“Not dead,” I responded, which was the short and simple truth. “What happened after I got stabbed?”

 

I couldn’t help but wonder why I was being allowed to recover in the hospital. Either the sheriff had argued on my behalf or Maribel had, which was the more likely of the two. I had the feeling that I could save his niece a thousand times and he’d still want me out of his town.

 

“I think I woke up a few minutes after you killed Zef… the vampire,” Maribel explained calmly. She was suddenly very interested in rearranging the flowers (I’d gotten flowers?) that were in a vase on my nightstand. Despite her calm tone, it was pretty obvious she was still upset about the whole thing.

 

“I pulled you off of her and started pressing bed sheets against your wound. I didn’t want to take the wood out. I was scared you’d get hurt worse if I did. Anyway, I kept screaming for help, but no one came and when I pressed the call button by the bed, nobody showed up. Your bleeding slowed down pretty fast, so I finally decided to just run for help and hope for the best. I didn’t know if the bleeding was slower because you’d run out of blood or if it was a dhampir thing, but I didn’t want to find out myself. There was a doctor lying in the hallway a little ways off. I guess Zef… the vampire managed to hypnotize the whole hospital before she came in. Anyway, I woke him up and got him to treat you. D and uncle Mervin – “

 

That was still making me grin, by the way.

 

“- came back a little while later. The boss vampire had gone after them in the forest and D took care of _what the hell are you doing?!”_

 

I was, in fact, scrambling off the bed and onto my feet as fast as I possibly could. There was a brief moment of vertigo, but it passed quickly. The smell of my things was coming from a cupboard nearby and I yanked it open, grabbing for my clothes with the kind of panicking haste you usually only see in disaster victims.

 

It occurred to me that I was mooning Maribel, but she’d seen worse things than my pasty white butt in the last few days.

 

My hoodie was gone, likely in the garbage, but that wasn’t a shock. It would have taken a really dedicated tailor to put it back together. My freshly laundered clothes smelled like detergent instead of vampire blood, which was a nice surprise. My shirt had a gaping hole in it over my right breast, but whatever. I could patch it myself later.

 

The moment Maribel had said “and D took care of”, I knew the job was done. The vampire of Skethagen was officially dead and, given that it was D on the job, all of his undead cronies had likely bitten the dust with it.

 

Which meant D had no more reason to be in town.

 

Which meant he’d left sometime when I was unconscious.

 

Which mean that he once again had several hours of traveling on me.

 

_FUCK!_

 

I was pulling up my pants when Maribel grabbed my arm, finally figuring out that shrieking wasn’t going to make me stop.

 

“Dualarc, _stop it!_ You just had a wooden stake pulled out of you!”

 

“Dhampir, yeah? I’m fine,” I shot back. It was actually true.

 

“No you’re not! Anyone would need to rest after that!”

 

“I’ve been unconscious for hours now! I’m rested! _And will you let me pull up my pants?!_ ”

 

She let go of me as quickly as if I’d slapped her.

 

While I was dressing, Maribel calmed down slightly. Instead of raging like a harpy, her next words were delivered with hard, insistent force.

 

“Don’t go after him. He said he doesn’t want you around.”

 

“Tough shit for him then,” I snapped while I buckled my belt.

 

“Damn it, Dualarc!” Maribel yelled. “He doesn’t want you around! He said it flat out, okay?! He paid for your hospital stay and told me and the doctors to make sure you knew he didn’t want you following him anymore! If you keep following him when he doesn’t you around, then one day he’s gonna get pissed off and – “

 

And I don’t know why – I really don’t – but that just did it.

 

“When I turned fifteen, me and my two best friends had a party in town. We stayed out later than we should have and I didn’t get back home until the sun was down. The door to my house was open and my mom was lying on the floor with bite marks on her neck. She woke up fine and we decided to deal with it on our own, until the Hunter we had sent for showed up. If anyone knew what had happened, they would have tried to lock her up or worse. So, for two days I was staying up each night to wait for that bastard and going around each day, pretending like nothing was wrong. I just said she was laid up in bed sick, and that was kind of the truth. It was all she could do to get into the bathtub to wash.”

 

I only knew that because I’d heard her fall and had asked what had happened. She insisted on locking herself in her room. It was the smart thing to do. It also made me a nervous wreck, not being able to keep an eye on her myself.

 

“I woke up in the middle of the third night because I heard something breaking,” I said flatly. I was lacing up my shoes and pointedly not looking at Maribel as I talked. “I have martial arts training, so I didn’t bother grabbing the rifle I kept in my room. In retrospect, that was kind of stupid of me. I just walked into the hallway to see what was wrong. My mother was lying on the floor with a pair of bleeding holes in her neck and there was a huge man in a long black cape standing over her. He had her blood on his mouth. He looked at me, smiled and then he left. My mom was dead when I checked on her.

 

“My neighbors staked her for me and I spent the rest of the night at my friend’s house, either praying for the bastard to come back so I could kill him or praying that my mother wasn’t really dead. Then, the next night, one of my wishes got answered and the bastard _did_ come back.”

 

I yanked the knot far harder than necessary and nearly snapped my laces.

 

“I attacked him. He broke both of my arms with one finger. And then he killed everyone in that house except for me.”

 

I wadded up the hospital gown and tossed it into the garbage can.

 

“My martial arts teacher and his son, who was another friend, lived next door and came to help when they heard the fight. He killed my teacher and took my friend. I’m kind of hoping he’s dead, but somehow, I doubt it.”

 

I finally looked up at Maribel. Her face was pale and she was staring at me like I was something she’d never seen before.

 

“When I was screaming for him to kill me too, to let Adolf go, to just leave us alone, at some point I slipped in ‘why are you doing this’, and do you know what he said to me, Maribel?”

 

She didn’t speak. She didn’t _breathe_.

 

That was okay. When I’d gotten the answer to that question, I hadn’t been breathing either.

 

What I said next had been written into my brain with fire.

 

_“Because I want to.”_

 

And didn’t that just sum up the whole vampire race? We do these things because we want to, silly boy.

 

“Do you get it now?” I asked through gritted teeth. I had left a few details out – deciding to go off the serum that made me pass for human, abandoning town after my urges got too strong, my house burning down after some idiot decided I had to be in league with the vampire since it let me live – but I had gotten the important bits out. Telling her what I had told _no one else_ had made something inside of me go blank and dead, but now, with my remembered hatred of that man combining with my frantic need to catch up to D, I could feel myself slipping towards yammering, incoherent hysteria.

 

“ _I._ _Am. Going. To. Kill. Him._ If it is the _last fucking thing_ I do on this Earth,” I growled. “With or without D’s help, I am going to kill him, but without would almost definitely not work. So, _please_ tell me you know which way D went when he left town.”

 

Maribel started at me silently, her mouth working like she was chewing gum.

 

That wasn’t what I needed.

 

“Maribel. Please.”

 

* * *

 

“Hey, wait up!”

 

He didn’t slow down.

 

“I know you can hear me!”

 

He still didn’t slow down.

 

What? You were maybe expecting something else?

 

“Anyway, thanks for paying my hospital bill. I’d hate to be running around with debt collectors after me. Next time though, would it kill you to leave a note telling me which way you went? Thank god for your stalking fan girls, that’s all I can say. If Maribel and Ari hadn’t watched you go off, I might have lost even more ground to you.”

 

“Go away.”

 

I grinned.

 

“Not a chance in hell.”

 

The road stretched on in front of us.

 

* * *

 

So, here’s my score, ladies and gentlemen:

 

I finally found D. That’s a plus.

 

He turned out to be less of a lone wolf and more of an asshole than my mother described. Minus.

 

I got to (kind of) participate in a vampire hunt. Plus.

 

I managed to make some halfway decent contributions, if not to D’s efforts, then to the townsfolk’s. Plus.

 

I also nearly killed Maribel, nearly got shot by the angry sheriff and nearly got staked by a crazy, blood sucking old biddy in those efforts, none of which would have happened (I think) if I’d had some help from you-know-who. Big minus.

 

I almost drank mole blood. Minus.

 

I got to see Maribel in a nightgown. Plus.

 

Skill wise, I was no better off than I’d been when I first entered the town. Minus.

 

Thanks to several frightening encounters, my vampire half had permanently increased what I did have several times over. Plus and minus.

 

So I was in fact a little bit worse off than I had been four days earlier.

 

Oh, wait. One more thing.

 

“Hey, D? If I lift up your hat, am I going to find horns?”

 

I now know he won’t kill me for being a smart ass.

 

Serious plus.


	10. Interlude ~ Letters to Mina 1

> Hey Mina,
> 
>  
> 
>                         Dualarc here. I’d ask how you are, but I think you’re the same as last time. My situation has changed quite a bit, however. There’s good stuff and bad stuff and same old shit stuff. I’ll start with the good.
> 
>  
> 
> First off, I GOT OUT OF BIRCH!!! I always said that I wanted to see the world and now I’m doing it, Mina. The only way this could be more awesome would be if you and Adolf were here with me. I’ve already been to so many places. Actually been there and not just looked at pictures in a book. The ocean is bigger than you can imagine and ~~the water really does taste like salt~~ ‘salt water’ isn’t just a name. Not that I drank it, you understand. That’s just what the dockworkers and fishermen I met at the pier told me when I was getting a boat.
> 
>  
> 
> Second of all, I FOUND D!!!
> 
>  
> 
> Now for the bad stuff.
> 
>  
> 
> First of all, I FOUND D!!! Take the biggest icicle in the world, carve a ~~pretty~~ handsome face onto it and wrap it all up in black. That’s D. The guy is so frigid he makes Mr. Johan look nice. Yeah, that bad.
> 
>  
> 
> Second of all, the previously mentioned icicle man won’t teach me. He says I’m a kid and I should go home. Screw that! I’m fifteen now and if he thinks he can ~~scare me~~ pressure me into leaving with his ~~death aura scary face~~ constant ignoring of me, he’s got another thing coming! It’s not like ~~I can go home~~ I’m short on time, so I’ll wear him down eventually.
> 
>  
> 
> So, now on to same old shit stuff.
> 
>  
> 
> We crossed the border to the next sector earlier this morning (sector 23, in case you were wondering) and we’ve been on the road towards the nearest town ever since. I need to get some new clothes (a needle and some thread will only carry you so far in the wilderness ~~and I’m sick of using my spare set of pants as a cowl~~ ) and I’m pretty sure D needs to stock up on some stuff too. His bags have been looking lighter, anyway. I’ve managed to do a few chores in the last town we came across, so at least I have a bit of money. With any luck, I’ll be able to get something that actually fits.
> 
>  
> 
> It’s been almost a month since the whole Skethagen fiasco and I haven’t heard so much as a whisper of other vampire activities since then. I don’t like it, but I think I’m going to have to get used to it. I can foresee a lot of ‘kill a vampire, wander, wander, wander, kill a vampire’ in my future. Remember when we were little and used to sneak under the tables in the tavern to listen to those Hunters’ stories while they passed through? Well, I definitely don’t remember them mentioning how they walked around for weeks, waiting for a job to show itself. You think the average problem in a Hunter’s life is the threat of death and dismemberment, but it’s not. It’s the boredom, Mina. The boredom is killing me, slowly but surely. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but if D doesn’t get a job offer soon, I might actually try to steal his hat again. I’m that bored.
> 
>  
> 
> (We were two days out of Skethagen, my face was burning without my hood and I was desperate. It did not end well, so don’t ask for details.)
> 
>  
> 
> I think D might be restless too, not that I can actually tell for certain. Sometimes I think I can hear him talking to himself. He even changes his voice to sound different. I’m hoping this is just him venting through his secret hobby of ventriloquism, because otherwise he’s insane. Mina, if D is insane, then I have a big problem. If he is insane and decides that murder is the only way to get of me (which it pretty much is, let’s face it), then I am screwed. It’s D vs. little old me and I’m not dumb enough to think I have a chance of winning.
> 
>  
> 
> Anyway, missing you and all that stuff. I’ll write more later.
> 
>  
> 
>                                                                                                 -Dualarc


	11. Traveling Onward

“So, what do you think? Should I get another hoodie or go for an actual coat?”

 

He didn’t answer.

 

I had my spare set of pants wrapped around my head á la hood. It was the best form of protection from the sun that I had available, even if it did bring my spare clothes down to underwear and socks. I could see our destination (Welcome to Myrsburg! said the sign) a little bit down the road. I hoped any tailors within weren’t unwilling to sell to a dhampir. Failing that, I hoped no one would realize that was what I was.

 

There wasn’t much hope of that while I was around D. Not sure why, but he never tried to hide what he was, even when it would make life easier for him. As soon as we got into town, I would have to get away from him (irony) and get my shopping down before the rumor mill got all the way around town.

 

There weren’t many guards at the front gate. That was a good sign. It meant no one expected much trouble. D rode up to the gate, I followed on foot and we were waved through. Of course, this wasn’t until he had sworn to be out of town by nightfall. A peaceful Frontier town is still a Frontier town.

 

He had to have something to do or else he would have just ridden right on past the town like he had done to the last six or seven settlements. I felt pretty confident that he wouldn’t leave for at least an hour or so, giving me plenty of time to get my shopping done. Three streets after we entered through the gate, I split from D’s trail and went looking for my tailor.

 

I found one only four blocks away. The only person inside was the owner, a bent old man working at a sewing machine behind the counter. I stepped through the doorway and pulled my makeshift head wrap off gratefully. Walking around in that thing was just embarrassing. The tailor had his back to me as I entered and I was about to clear my throat when I noticed something.

 

There was a set of glasses on the counter by the cash register.

 

Now, I am not proud of what I did next. A little amused, sure.

 

I palmed the glasses and dropped them into my pocket.

 

_‘Okay then, Let’s try this.’_

 

“Excuse me?”

 

The old man harrumphed and turned away from his machine. Sure enough, he was squinting at me.

 

With much _let me get closer_ and _where’d I put my darn specs_ , I walked out with a new outfit and no cash. I didn’t have time to be fitted, which left me with buying the things he had available on the shelves. This saddened me, because the only coat that fit was a jacket with no hood. Desperate to avoid using my pants as a face guard again, I asked him to throw in a battered looking scarf that had been wadded up and tossed in with the socks. A few quick loops around my head and I had a workable solution to my dilemma. So long as no one mistook me for a ninja, I’d be fine. I made sure to drop his glasses and then ‘find’ them on my way out.

 

Sliding my sunglasses back into place, I breathed a happy sigh of relief. That was one problem solved. Now I just had to find D before he split town.

 

Couldn’t take very long.

 

* * *

 

….

 

…Okay, I take that back.

 

* * *

 

 

The bastard had gone back on his own trail so many times that it was like being inside one of the mazes the newspapers put in the puzzles section. I endured it for all of half an hour before giving up and just heading for the gate to wait for him.

 

Then the guards received the ‘opening’ signal from the guys at the _other_ gate. You know, the one at the other end of the town.

 

The sole reason they have this set of signals to alert the other guys that someone is entering or leaving is for situations like this; where one person is leaving town and the other person at the opposite end doesn’t want them to. Granted, it was probably designed more to contain escaping criminals from the officers pursuing them, but the thought behind it was the same.

 

Damn it, D!

 

* * *

 

Stop ignoring me, I’d said.

 

I’m not a kid and I can take anything, I’d said.

 

The whole point of making mistakes is to learn from them. With as many as I had made, I should be a genius by now.

 

So, why was he still running circles around me with this kindergarten B.S.? Why had I not even once thought that he would use the other gate?

 

And why was every single person in this whole town _suddenly in my freaking path?!_

 

* * *

  

I caught up to him at sunset.

 

I’d spent hours running after him to get back the lead he had gotten over me. It was just like the good old days when we had first met: him, pretending I didn’t exist. The horse, not caring that I existed. Yours truly, wishing one or both of them would break a leg sometime soon.

 

He was stopping for the night and had just set up a small fire for his plasma tea when I staggered off the road, panting like a dog under the summer sun. I knew he was making tea, because he never made a fire for anything else. Dhampirs can see in the dark like daylight, nothing with half a brain needed to see a fire to be told to stay away from him and it wasn’t out of any desire for warmth. I haven’t really gotten hot or cold in weeks, no matter how sunny or cloudy the weather was. I’m not sure I can anymore.

 

He didn’t look up at me as I dropped down on the other end of the fire. I was fishing through my rather small amount of belongings for a kettle and my own stash of plasma capsules when I heard a low, quiet inquiry reach my ears.

 

“When did you realize I was using the other gate?”

 

I blinked and glanced up at D. He was staring at me from across the tiny flames and in spite of the question, his black eyes were as empty as ever.

 

I shrugged and pulled the tiny kettle from the bottom of my pack. There was a placid river a few yards away and I walked over to fill the kettle with its waters.

 

“I was at the gate opposite the one we’d entered through. I knew you weren’t staying because I heard you promise to be out before sunset, so I just went to the gate we hadn’t been through and waited for you. That mixing up your scent thing would have worked if it wasn’t for that. Why would you have been going to all those buildings if there wasn’t anything in town you really wanted? You could get basic supplies, catch up on the news and be out before an hour had passed. Didn’t think you’d go back the way we came, though,” I explained.

 

“Hm,” was his only response.

 

Jerk.

 

* * *

 

 

It only occurred to me later, as I was drifting off to sleep beneath a big elm tree, that I had just explained how I had found out his deception and made it that much easier to screw me over the next time he felt like it.

 

Crap.


	12. Projectiles

Center your weight.

 

Find your balance.

 

Breathe in.

 

Pull back your arm.

 

Form a fist.

 

And….

 

Exhale-strike!

 

The boulder was knocked back a good twenty feet, and rolled over four times before splitting in half and settling.

 

Nice.

 

The last time I had tried that, it had only resulted in me burying my arm into rock.

 

One of the things about having your abilities drastically change in such a short time is that you basically have to relearn _everything_. That punch I just threw? About a month ago, that would have been a 13 on my 1-to-10 scale. Now it was barely a 5. Knowing that it was a 5 also helped me with my stance and angle of attack. Instead of winding up with a huge lump of granite around my arm, I actually managed to force the boulder away from me instead of forcing myself into the rock.

 

Yeah. That matters.

 

D, strange as it seemed, appeared to be taking it easy for the day. He hadn't left the meadow he'd camped in the night before, choosing instead to sharpen his sword, patch his coat, fuel and feed his cyborg-horse, etc. Even Hunters need their down time, I guess.

 

I'd chosen to spend the day sleeping in as much as possible, nearly going into a coma by noon. Even ignoring my lack of sleep, dhampirs did not function very well in the middle of the day and noon made my body say "nap time, NOW!"

 

It was the first chance I'd had to do so in a long time. Around 2 o'clock I felt like coming to life, so I decided to practice some of the kata I knew. Between following D, finding odd jobs, and trying to not get eaten, I hadn't had very much time for practice. Going over the stances seemed like a decent way to test my new limits out, as well.

 

My senses – sight, hearing, smell, and so on – had stopped startling me with their intensity. I could focus and filter out what I did not need or want from what I did, and before long it was like I had been functioning with such sensitivity all my life.

 

The rest of my body was a different matter. Every now and then I would grip something too hard or take a step too fast. Little things, but enough to jar me. I needed to know my own body, hence the training today.

 

A few uprooted and shattered trees littered the area – evidence of my earlier shenanigans. If anyone came looking around there for firewood later, they'd be very happy. The remains were giving me ideas, too.

 

The sad fact of the matter is, I'd taken up unarmed combat as a discipline almost entirely because I was too poor to buy and maintain a decent weapon. My on-the-road lifestyle being what it was, that wouldn't change anytime soon. And, as Granny Zefula had so kindly shown me back in that middle-of-nowhere town, at my skill level sometimes fists just aren't enough.

 

There was the problem.

 

The solution?

 

The solution was lying in front of me.

 

A pile of hardwood freshly ripped apart by my afternoon exertions.

 

Stakes are the oldest way to kill a vampire. …Well, that might not be true. Fire could be the oldest. It's definitely one of those two. As I said before, the odds of me getting a flamethrower were pretty low, so that left stakes: simple, reliable, and easy to make yourself.

 

I gathered up some wood pieces and took them to D's fire. If he didn't want to share, he should have put up a fence. As it was, he just gave me a ticked eyebrow glance and then went back to oiling the leather of his saddle.

 

Carving and sharpening stakes is easy enough. The hard part is getting the sap out of the wood. The easiest way to do it is just to let the wood age so the sap dries up over time. I didn't have a few weeks to wait on those, though. Setting them over the fire and letting the sap steam out wasn't exactly good for the wood, but it wouldn't weaken it terribly. All I really needed out of them was one good jab – if they chose to break apart after that, it was fine with me. Just so long as they broke apart _inside_ their target.

 

I had six stakes by the time I was done. I wasn't lacking for wood, but I was lacking for storage capacity. My bag might have been fairly empty, but it wasn't that big either. Half a dozen was my limit.

 

It was past dark by the time I was done and I held one finished product by my fingertips to look it over. It was still hot from the fire that had dried and hardened it. The wood didn't look warped and I couldn't see any cracks. Good enough, then.

 

"What are you planning on doing with those?"

 

Remember that thing I mentioned? The _you-don't-forget-he's-there-but-he's-so-freaking-quiet_ thing? Amazingly enough, that's still in effect.

 

D had finished his chores – had been finished for a while, if the packed up gear next to him was any indication – and was staring at me. More specifically, at the rough stake in my hands.

 

I blinked, thrown for a loop momentarily (yeah, _that's_ still in effect too) and then answered.

 

"My master once said that his master was a retired vampire Hunter who could tear a vampire's heart out with his bare hands. He really was that good, even if he was a human himself. I'm _not_ that skilled. I'll probably be able to do it barehanded sooner or later, but until then, these are for piercing through what my hands can't."

 

D made a faint 'hm' noise, which was a lot more response than I thought I'd get. Then, shockingly, "Can you throw them?"

 

I could get what he was hinting at.

 

"You mean as projectiles, at a distance?"

 

Not a bad idea. I stood up and looked around the meadow. Most of the trees that had dotted the meadow were down and out, but a few had managed to survive by virtue of being closer to the forest edge than I was willing to venture towards. One of them was a huge iron-bark oak that was beyond anything I had knocked down. It was about ninety yards to my northwest.

 

Now, I would like you to remember something for me: _iron-bark_. That's the name of that particular type of oak tree. It is called that for a good reason. They can make armor and weapons out of that bark. Because it is as hard as iron. That bark. Is as hard. As iron.

 

This is going to be very important in a minute.

 

Ninety yards. I had hit targets at twice that distance during the few times I had practiced sharpshooting with the other boys of Birch as part of our militia training, but never with a melee weapon. The closest thing that came to it was playing darts at the bar and that had only been at a distance of thirty feet.

 

Still, why not try?

 

I hefted the stake and got a feel for its weight, its balance. It was not what I would have wanted, but not terrible either. I hadn't carved it with balance in mind, which was a mistake I would never repeat. However, if I just twisted my wrist like _that_ when I tossed it –

 

The stake flew into the dark towards the tree and punched two inches into the wood, just below the fist-sized knothole I had been aiming at. That had better than I had hoped, really.

 

I grinned and let out a little "Hah!" That was nothing a little target practice wouldn't cure. I started walking to get my stake back.

 

By the way, the importance of it being an iron-bark tree?

 

That actually comes around because of _this_ part.

 

Something _sizzled_ by my right ear and flew like a streak of lightning to slam dead center into the knothole I had missed. I smelled burning air. Twisting my head so fast I felt something pull, I beheld D still sitting calmly by his fire, idly examining another one of my stakes.

 

He hadn't even _turned around_ and he had….

 

I could see it, even that far way and at night. The tiny little wooden needle that was near _fully imbedded_ in the hard-as-iron bark of what had to be a two hundred year old tree. The rough, home-made needle that had been burned by the friction of the air as it traveled at speeds that caused it to incandesce.

 

The needle was still smoking faintly when I arrived at the tree. I dug it out with my fingernails and held it up to my eyes. It was a good eight inches long. I took another long look at the dark figure backlit by the small fire, only his broad back visible to me from where he sat.

_He hadn't even turned around._


	13. Bath

Of course I had fallen in the mud. Of course I had.

 

God damned swamps.

 

D was passing through Kanghal Swamp in the south-east and I was gamely following after him. For those who have never had the bad fortune that necessitates traveling through there, let me just sum it up for you:

 

1 – Bugs.

 

2 – Stink.

 

3 - Slime.

 

There. I have now given you everything you will ever need to know about Kanghal Swamp. Thank me later.

 

It took three days to get to the other side. That was three days of sleeping in trees (because I could never find any dry, solid ground. D never seemed to have much trouble with it, but his islands were always sized for one), avoiding the poisonous creatures that wanted to kill me (easier to say _all of them_ ), the quicksand pits that hid beneath tepid water and the never-ending reek of swamp gas. Your nose is supposed to ignore familiar smells after a certain amount of time. Three days is not enough time.

 

By the time we emerged on the other side, I was so filthy my own mother would not have recognized me. I had literally been caked in swamp filth and there wasn’t an inch that had escaped it. The only safe part of my person was my bag, thankfully water-proofed. I had a spare set of clothes that remained dry, and they were just waiting for me to clean up and pull them out.

 

So I started a fire when D stopped for the night, stripped down and then started heating up water in my little kettle. Not too far away from me, he was doing the same.

 

Yes, D needs to bathe. You probably don’t think about it when you see him, but he does in fact get dirty. No, I did not look. Even ignoring the fact that I’m pretty sure he’s my… well, never mind. Even ignoring something I’m mostly certain of, there are things I was raised to not do. Peeping on naked people is one of them.

 

All I was getting was a scrubbing with a rag I had dug up from somewhere, but it might as well have been a bathhouse. I pulled out my clothes and moved to set them on a nearby rock for quick access.

 

And then I tripped.

 

I don’t know how. I just did. My clothes went flying into a patch of mud formed from runoff from one of the streams that fed into the swamp. The various amphibians and reptiles that hung around that area had a very entertaining minute afterwards. If nothing else, they came away from that night with a more fluent vocabulary of curses.

 

So, I was filthy and my clothes were filthy. I had to wash and dry them before I could wear them, which meant I was going to be spending the night on the shore of a wet, cold swamp in the nude. That prospect wasn’t the _worst_ I had ever faced, but it wasn’t pleasant either.

 

(And before you even ask, no, I was not going to ask D for some of his clothes. The guy was a head taller than me, a lot wider, and the idea just seemed weird anyway.)

 

The water in my kettle went toward my laundry. It took me a long time, since I had to keep refilling it and waiting for it to heat up. By the time I had washed both of my outfits, my scarf and my coat, it was closer to morning than night. The coming sun was going to fry me if I didn’t get dressed quickly. With that in mind, I hung my clothes in the most open place I could put them, in the hopes that the open air would make them dry out faster.

 

I also prayed that D wouldn’t steal them.

 

I mean, that sort of thing seemed beneath him, but you never know. At least, I didn’t.

 

I scraped all the swamp slime off of me as quickly as I could and poured one final kettle’s worth of hot water over my hair to rinse it. It shouldn’t have felt as glorious as it did.

 

I curled up in the thickly leafed branches of a tree for what I hoped was the last night. With any luck, the massive amount of leaves would keep the sunlight off my bare skin. Bugs weren’t much of a problem (they could smell my vampire blood, I think), but having all that bark pressed against my bare skin wasn’t comfortable.

 

After a very long time of tossing and turning, I finally fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

“Come on. Just grab his clothes.”

 

“….”

 

“Oh, _please_. It’ll be funny.”

 

“….”

 

“…You’re a total buzz-kill, you know that?”

 

* * *

 

I woke up cursing.

 

The leaves hadn’t helped.

 

I dropped out of the branches only half awake and scrambled into the tree’s shadow. It was only a mild relief. I needed my clothes back.

 

The dash to the skeletal tree I had draped them over would stay with me for the rest of my life (no matter how much I wished otherwise). Once there, I took a moment to brush off as much dirt as I could from my body and then started throwing on my still mostly damp clothing. The rest I had to shove into my bag. With my luck, mold would be growing there before the week was out.

 

D had, thankfully, not taken off before I woke up. He was still packing his things together when I finished lacing up my shoes.

 

I started down the road ahead of him while he swung up onto his horse. He would overtake me quick enough. I knew that from lots of prior experience, so hearing the clip-clop of his horse’s hooves coming up by my side was not surprising. What was surprising was when D spoke.

 

“Stay away from me today, if you please.”

 

What? Okay, we weren’t close by any stretch of the imagination, but why –

 

“You rather stink.”

 

….

 

…That _prick_.

 

I wished I’d grabbed some leeches for him while we still in the swamp.


	14. Nice?

It had been a bad week. I mean, I’m a homeless, fifteen year old, orphaned dhampir following the world’s biggest asshole for the sole reason of getting him to teach me a trade that is essential legal assassination so that I can hunt down and murder the homicidal vampire who got a kick out of massacring everyone I loved on my birthday. So, if I say I am having a bad week, I am having a _really fucking bad week_.

 

In no particular order:

 

  * Rival Hunters wanting to eliminate D from the competition.
  * Losing my one pair of boots to the teeth of some kind of super boar belonging to one of said rival Hunters.
  * Three solid days and nights of storms.
  * No decent place to sleep and I would like to point out that my only criteria for ‘decent’ these days are 1) dry and 2) nothing tries to kill me for at least four hours
  * D was still an asshole.
  * No sign of a job anywhere in that corner of the world, whether killing vampires for D or chopping wood for me.
  * I stopped knowing where we were two days ago. I was now operating on ‘somewhere between the Pacifica Ocean and Urubos Salt Plains.’ That only gave me about 1750 square miles to wander through.
  * I was running low on plasma capsules again.
  * No, seriously, D was still being a _huge_ All I did was ask him where we were, and he decided right then and there to jump his horse over to the other side of the canyon we had been walking along. I do not have a horse, so I had to climb down, cross over the bottom and then climb all the fucking way back up. That monkey fucker.



 

I don’t think I need to tell you how the plan to kill D went for the idiots who tried it. After the boar master (and who the hell decides to train some mutant boar to fight for them? I mean, yeah, it was a nasty little bastard, but seriously, _it was a pig_ ) was unceremoniously bisected, I was happy to find that his feet were about my size and so liberated his almost blood free sandals.

 

…Don’t look at me like that. He wasn’t going to use them anymore and considering that it was his pet that ruined my boots, the whole thing was really just karmic justice.

 

Anyway, my feet were not terribly happy with that decision. The storms made everything wet and my toes didn’t even have the dubious protection that my boots once offered. The cold did not bother me, but the constant feel of slimy mud on my toes did. Then the sun came back and I had a whole new problem.

 

By the time we finally arrived back in a region I recognized, I could not walk without pain. The bottoms of my feet had fared okay enough, but the tops were in constant agony. Although I would have worn my socks, the boar had torn them nearly to shreds and they were useless to me. My spare thread had been used up the month before for repairing my jacket after a run-in with a were-leopard. Until I got more, my supposed-socks would have to stay sitting uselessly in my bag.

 

Seven days after that fresh hell started, D decided to stop on the edge of what I finally knew to be Sector 19. I dropped to the ground by his horse and didn’t even bother with my own nightly rituals while D began to dismantle his gear. I had not gotten one good night of sleep the whole week and I was starting to feel it. As far as I was concerned, waking up with greasy hair was worth the extra half-hour of sleep it would get me.

 

I bunched up my thin bag for a pillow and then drifted off to the sound of D cleaning dirt and rocks from his cyborg-horse’s hooves.

 

…And… this is where shit gets weird….

 

* * *

 

 

I woke up and D was making me pancakes.

 

No, I am totally serious about that.

 

He even had maple syrup. I could smell it from where I was laying. Not a big achievement at that point in my life, but still. Maple syrup. D. And I could smell it.

 

What the hell had I missed when I slept?

 

I rolled up onto my knees and stared. There was no other possible reaction to seeing D, my sociopathic vampire Hunter, making a delicious breakfast on a cheery campfire and _smiling_.

 

(Somewhere, I am sure a geothermal monitor noted a sharp drop in temperature within the Earth’s lower levels.)

 

“Dualarc, please come and help yourself,” D invited happily. He turned to face me and smiled with good humor, his teeth glinting blindingly in the sunlight.

 

It only made me more suspicious.

 

“Who the fuck are you and where is D?” I demanded.

 

“What do you mean?” Not-D responded. “You’ve had a rough week and I wanted to do something nice for my new apprentice. Is that so wrong?”

 

Yes. Yes it was, infact, _very_ wrong. It was wrong on levels that defied definition or description. It was wrong like radiation, causing a fundamental breakdown in the mechanics of my universe.

 

I had never been so glad that I slept with my fighting gloves on.

 

I went from zero to sixty in about a tenth of a second, hurling myself on all fours from my sleeping place towards Not-D. He cheerfully blocked my punch with the frying pan, flipped it back around to catch the falling half-cooked pancake, and used his free hand to swing me down to the ground all in one smooth motion. That same hand pressed down and kept me pinned long enough for Not-D to actually sit on top of me and remove any chance of escape. That one movement had been enough for me to see that whoever this guy was, he even _moved_ like D and that meant I wasn’t going anywhere unless he let me.

 

“Dualarc,” Not-D said cheerfully, “why are you in such a bad mood this morning? Really, look around. The sun is shining, we have a delicious meal ready and no one is trying to kill us yet. So, dig in and relax. We have nothing better to do today.”

 

He shoved the frying pan with its still sizzling batter under my nose. The pancake contained the soul of a forsaken child, I just knew it.

 

“No, let me go. You’re not D and I don’t want your pancakes!” I yelled. Not the best come back, but I was starting to freak out by that point.

 

“Everyone wants my pancakes,” not-D said cheerfully. He was so _happy_. It was beyond terrifying.

 

“I don’t!” I yelled louder, and then he shoved the frying pan even closer.

 

“Yes, you do,” Not-D said, and now there was a tone of command in his voice. “You will eat my cooking Dualarc, and you. Will. Like. It. And then we have the morning’s training to begin. I still need to find out how quickly you can dodge a lethal strike.”

 

Wait, _what?!_

 

“Don’t worry though,” Not-D continued. “You won’t die.”

 

Because your dark soul will only gain sustenance if I’m alive to suffer?

 

“This is all just a dream, really.”

 

And then I woke up.

 

* * *

  

There was no pancake smell this time.

 

I was more relieved by that then I like to admit. Those are ruined for me now.

 

I sat up and saw D saddling up his horse. Ha! He hadn’t been able to sneak away today! That had to be a good sign. Things were looking up.

 

I was still dressed, so all I had to do was grab my bag and I was ready to go. D gave me a glance from beneath his hat and then went right back to what he was doing. No cheery smile, no attempts to force feed me breakfast; all was right in my crap-sack world.

 

“Something wrong?” D asked quietly.

 

Wait. He’s initiating a conversation? Shit, maybe I was still dreaming.

 

“Are you going to teach me how to dodge a deathblow the hard way?” I asked.

 

He stopped fiddling with the saddle straps then and gave me an unreadable look. “Do you want me to?”

 

“Uh, no. No thank you.”

 

Well, I was definitely awake by then.

 

Still, it was valuable lesson – if D is being nice, you aren’t conscious.

 

Now, on to the next town!

 

…And clean clothes.


	15. Interlude ~ D 1

The boy is chattering again.

 

D does not use that word lightly. ‘Chattering’ is the only thing that comes to mind. The boy will talk simply to hear the sound of his own voice. He will talk about anything and everything, for as long as he sees fit. Occasionally he will pull out the flute that he was playing on the night when D first passed by him, but for the most part he simply talks.

 

Ah. Now he is stopping to look at an insect. Some sort of dragonfly that has landed on a flower and is waiting for prey to pass by. It sits perfectly still as the gigantic pale face looms up in front of it. The boy stares, smiles and then gently brushes a fingertip across the edge of a wing. The dragonfly takes off in a whirl and the boy grins mischievously.

 

There is another thing. He is so easily distracted. Pretty girls, unusual insects, flowers, tadpoles in a pond, the pattern of rings inside a shattered tree; the list goes on. For whatever reason, as soon as he sees something he likes, his whole focus shifts and latches onto it until such time as he grows bored.

 

(How many times could D kill him when he ignores everything else like that? Once is enough.)

 

He has begun carrying sharpened stakes. His carving skills have progressed over the many long nights and they have the points of spears now. He practices throwing them whenever he can, filling the night with the sound of wood hitting wood. When the _thunk thunk thunk_ -ing has ceased, then it is time for his hand-to-hand practice. He throws rocks and then runs to catch them before they land. He punches the hard earth, ringing the campsite with craters. He spars with himself, creating opponents out of the shadows.

 

When he deems himself done, he will occasionally brew a pot of blood tea to drink. As his bag becomes thinner, this happens less often. Many nights, he simply closes his eyes and sleeps on the dirt. Then the morning sun rises and D sets off. The boy, sooner or later, will invariably follow.

 

(But there are nights – few and far between – when D can hear small sounds coming from the boy. “Mother.” “Mina.” “Adolf.” “Jaeger.” “Please.” “Kill.” “Sorry.” “Don’t.” He ignores these sounds, as he ignores everything that he can ignore about the boy. Tae is dead, that much he already knows, and getting the full story will not change that.)

 

Some days are luckier than others and he has a few hours before the boy will come running up in a foul mood and give him a tongue-lashing that has less effect than a flea bite. Other mornings, he will rise and see that the boy is already doing the same.

 

Then begins the trek. D will range over swamp and plain, mountain and valley, canyon and desert, and the boy will follow. In spite of weather, terrain, flora and fauna, the boy will follow. D will acknowledge the boy’s stubbornness, if nothing else.

 

It is occasionally amusing to see him wrestle with some irritated creature of the wild. D can navigate around traps and ambushes well enough, but the child has clearly never been out of his own town before whatever caused him to begin his chase of D. He could not recognize quicksand or a sleeping-death flower before he quite literally stumbled across them. D will hear a furious tirade of cursing which would eventually end and not too long after the boy would be following him again. One mark in his favor is that he never makes the same mistake twice.

 

(But in a world where even one mistake is enough to kill you, D has no hopes for this boy leading a long life.)

 

The boy is difficult around humans. Between weeks on the road with no other living soul and the knowledge that many would hate him if they learned what he was, D can see the boy oscillating between confidence (wherein he is straight forward and polite) and worry (wherein he will revert to sarcasm for everything). He is growing more at ease with his dealings with humans, though why he had no practice before was… but no, he was ignoring the boy, wasn’t he? That was best.

 

Because the boy is going to die soon. Most of the people around D did. “Wherever you are becomes the valley of the shadow of death,” the creature had said once. It was no exaggeration. D walked into danger and more often than not those who followed him were killed. The boy had lasted longer than most already, but it would not continue like that.

 

(And even if the boy managed to survive everything D endured, there was still _him_. “You were my only success,” and those words drive him mad, so he buries them someplace deep. The scores of failures he has met hold a reserved place in his memories and there are more waiting to be found, he knows. _That man_ seeks success above all else and it would not matter if it was his own child who failed to succeed.)

 

He has too many dead people to remember as it is.

 

One more will not be appreciated.

 


	16. Dream

Dreams are funny things.

I mean, I’ve already told you about the D makes me pancakes one, so you should know what I mean. Sometimes you go to sleep and wake up later thinking, ‘ _What the Hell was that about?_ ’ Other times, you wake up shaking and shivering, swear that you will never sleep again and go on to consume nothing but caffeine for a week until you crash.

Sometimes though, you get really nice things in your sleep.

And then you wake up.

And wish you hadn’t.

 

* * *

 

 

Mina was smiling. I had finally gotten Jaeger in a sparring match and beaten him, and she was smiling just because I was so damn proud. Jaeger was sulking a bit, but not too much. He was happy too. I had finally started to really push him to improve. Teacher had seen us off with a smile, pleased that his two students were still on good terms after the match.

The sun was shining and it didn’t hurt me. I wore short sleeves and sandals, but my skin didn’t burn. I licked my lips, thinking of the ice cream we were going towards, and felt nothing sharp scrape my tongue as I passed it over my teeth. I was thirsty, but not for blood.

The lemonade took care of the thirst. I had glass after glass, as I chipped away at the nearly rock hard scoop of vanilla sitting in my bowl. Mina and Jaeger’s chocolate was not nearly so tough and they finished before I did. Lesson learned. Get that next time.

We went to Mina’s house. Her mother made us dinner after we spent the rest of the afternoon reenacting the match for her benefit. She laughed and applauded at all the right places, then broke down laughing hysterically when I pantsed Jaeger for saying he went easy on me. We stayed until sunset – the unspoken home time – before leaving. I came home and saw the door open.

It wasn’t worrying though. Mom was right there in the doorway, waving me in. She looked a bit exasperated and I remembered that I had never let her know my plans that day. Stupid me. She had been worried. It was all right now though.

I went inside and, for the second time, told my story of finally beating my upperclassman. She was so pleased. Learning how to fight had always been important to me since we lived outside of town. To see me succeed at such a level made her proud. She told me that before I went to bed.

It had been such a good day.

Why couldn’t I always have days like those in my dreams?

 

* * *

 

 

I woke up.

I wished I hadn’t.

It was easy to ignore when I had something else to focus on. The anger, the sadness, the loneliness, the hopelessness. If I had something to do, they faded away.

But today I was safe. Relatively. D had received permission to lodge in the hostel’s barn, and made no complaint when I scrambled into the hayloft. I had had a cup of tea the day before and wasn’t thirsty or hungry. My clothes were still clean enough and had no new rips or tears to fix. There was no news of a job to follow D towards. There was nothing to do. Nothing but lay in the loft and think. And remember.

And wish that I was dead, too.


	17. Comatose

A word on hunting in general:

A lot of people think it’s all one long adventure that never really gets boring, that you just jump immediately from one fight to the next, that you never have time to rest or relax.

Here’s the word I want to impart to you all:

 _Bullshit_.

I’m sure I’ve made it abundantly clear by now that there is often a _long_ period of time between jobs that basically amounts to wandering around and hoping you get to sleep beneath a roof. Vampires are on the unwritten endangered species list these days. It’s been thousands of years since their heyday and in all the world, I don’t think there’s more than a thousand left. Mind you, I _could_ be wrong. Maybe there’s an undead necropolis bustling far beneath our feet, and its lords and peons are just waiting for the winter solstice of the year XXXXX to arise and devour us all. I could believe that simply because I can see the universe being that much of a bitch, but that’s a discussion for another day. The point here is, I’ve had a lot of time to be bored.

Now, D isn’t completely picky about his jobs. There doesn’t have to be a vampire directly involved with one. He’s taken a few jobs to excavate and explore old vampire castle ruins, to transport a few victims to designated ‘safe zones’ when it became clear their attacker had fled for the hills long before D arrived (seriously, some of them hear he’s coming and just bail like rats) and once I followed along on a book hunt when some wealthy eccentric decided he wanted a copy of the blacklisted “Dawn of the Nobility” by some author named Sangster.* So long as vampires were involved somehow, there was a chance D would take the job. The actual hunts we got were pretty few and far apart.

The second one I followed along on was about five months after leaving Skethagon. A family had been attacked over the course of three nights by a shadowed figure who left bites marks on their throats. The two daughters were in comas, the son was bedridden but unbitten, the mother was dead and the father was pissed. The father was so pissed off, in fact, that he was willing to pay a dozen couriers to ride out in all directions with messages asking for D to come around and eviscerate the bloodsucker. It had all the marks of a simple, straight forward hunt.

Really, that should have been my first warning.

 

* * *

 

 

The town was a small collection of one-story buildings built in a circle around the village well. I never thought I’d see a place that I could really call a ‘pit’, but there you go. It was small, dirty and mean looking. That the client’s house was one of the cleaner looking ones did not give me any relief. Clean was relative in that place. Honestly, the thing I was most wondering about was money. The place was only one step up from a shanty town, so how the hell was D going to get paid?

If D had any such hesitation, he didn’t show it. He rode his horse right up the main road, through the battered looking front gate to the village and went directly to the jail. Why the jail? A tiny place like that didn’t have a vault room in their hospital. Hell, I’m not sure they had a hospital, come to think of it. They might have had to make do with local medicine and a few herbalists. The result was that any vampire victims were to be isolated behind the thickest walls and strongest doors available. You know, assuming they weren’t just killed outright.

The whole family was there. The daughters were laid out on the jail cots in two separate cells, while both the father and son shared the third. That didn’t surprise me. The message said the attacks had continued for three days and hiding a vampire attack, even to protect your children, is a quick way to piss off your neighbors.

Just like we were told, both girls (twins by the look of it) were pale and unresponsive. After speaking with the jailor to get the keys, D had immediately gone inside to the girls and touched his left hand to their foreheads. Neither sleeping beauty responded at all, nor did they react when he pressed a small glittering amulet to their skin. Kind of looked like a ‘t’ and it made my eyes hurt.

_‘Have to ask him about that later.’_

D appeared to be frowning when he pulled away from the second girl and went to the men of the family. I wasn’t imagining it either. It took me a while to notice, but D actually did have a series of tiny micro expressions. There was calm D, annoyed D, confused D, focused D, and… that was all I’d identified so far. Calm D was the most common.

The father was a worker in the town’s granite quarry, a man named Phillip O’Hara. He looked like he was built from the rock he pulled out of the earth, but there were signs of cracks. His eyes had dark rings beneath them and wrinkles cut dark lines across his forehead. When he spoke to D, his voice had the monotonous quality of someone struggling to stay focused.

“So, you’d be D then? Good to know you’ve come,” O’Hara said by way of greeting.

The son was sleeping on the cot, only one step away from his sisters’ state. D and O’Hara talked shop behind me while I went to take a closer look.

“The first attack was almost ten days ago now, if I recall right. May and June had turned in for the night, Diana was finishing up the dishes, and Rikard and I were repairing the hall door. The last screw was being stubborn. Diana had already gone to bed when we got it in. We both decided to call it a night soon after and when Rikard went upstairs to his room – it’s next to the girls’, you see – he said he thought he heard someone talking real low. He peeked in through the door, but didn’t see anyone. The window over their bed was open, though. He closed it, went back out and got into his own bed for the night.”

Rikard himself was a young man a few years older than me. He had the pale skin of someone who did not go outside very often and it looked natural, not a result of blood loss. As I understood it, the town’s two main means of supporting itself were the quarry where O’Hara worked and their rice crop. Why would a local man have the look of a shut-in when every person in the village had to work outside?

“They both had a look like they were sick the next morning. I told them to stay in bed for the day, and Diana and Rikard took care of them so they didn’t have to work. They were both tired, but awake and they understood when they were being spoken too. It was still that way when I got home. We had dinner in their room, so they wouldn’t feel left out. Barely ate anything, said it made them feel queasy, but we just chalked it up to them having stomachaches. I took the dishes down and cleaned them, Rikard made them some medicine, and Diana gave it to them and promised to stay with them during the night.”

He made medicine? Maybe he was one of the town herbalists/doctors? Or maybe he was just chronically ill and learned to make do with what he had.

“When morning rolled around, they were worse. Neither of them could get out of bed and both of them looked paler than their sheets. Diana woke up in our bed, but couldn’t remember going back to it or why she had decided to leave them. I hoped it was just paranoia, but I checked their bodies and found… _those marks_ on their necks. After that, I knew it wasn’t just a sickness.”

I had pulled back from Rikard and was sitting on the floor by his bed. I could see O’Hara’s shoulders trembling when he spoke.

“What was I going to do? If there was a vampire nearby, the whole town was in danger. If I told them how I knew, then it’d be my girls in trouble. It turned out better than I thought – they ain’t killed them out of hand – but they’re going to spend the rest of their lives being looked down on for this. I didn’t want that happening. I hoped if it was just the one vampire and I could drive it off, then they’d get better. But if things went south, I needed a backup plan.”

D said nothing, but the unspoken ‘me’ was loud and clear.

“While Rikard and I set up traps and alarms around the house, I had Diana go to the post office and hire every courier who was in that day. Told them I’d pay triple if they’d quietly ask around and see if there was a Hunter willing to take on a job. One of them came back after only a few hours and said you’d been seen in the area. I figured it was God cutting me a break, but I guess not.

“Anyway, that night all three of us were watching over the girls. We’d moved down into the basement for a bit more security, but we still heard the alarms go off. It was worse when they went quiet. They were only designed to do that if they were shut off by us inside. Anything else meant the security system had been destroyed.

“The door broke apart. I don’t remember anything too clearly after that. I fired my gun until it was empty, so did Diana, and Rikard used up his crossbow’s shot, but I doubt we hit anything. I never got a good look at it. Damn thing smacked me into a wall hard enough to knock my lights out. When I woke up, both girls were comatose, Diana was dead and Rikard was barely able to move.

“After that, I crawled to my neighbor’s house and begged for help. A few days later and here we are.”

It was a pretty sorry story. I had to wonder how much of it could have been avoided if he had just come clean to the town in the first place. Then again, how much of mine could have been different? I didn’t know and didn’t like thinking about it.

“Is there anything at all you can tell me about what attacked you?” D finally asked.

“Just that it always got in without much trouble. We didn’t find any marks on the windows or door, except the one it broke down at the end. Could be one of those types that becomes mist or something like that.”

And without another word, D left.

Such good manners that man had.

As ever, I moved to follow him out and that was when the son’s hand latched onto me. My head exploded in pain like someone had smacked me with a sledgehammer and I fell.


	18. Broken Home

- _pressure all around, crushing me –_

**WHOAREYOUWHATAREYOUTELLME**

- _so painful, invading, controlling, that’s mine that’s me getoutgetout-_

**WHOAREYOUAREYOUAVAMPIREWHEREISMYFATHER**

- _make it stop, push back, somehow, make it stop RIGHT NOW!-_

And I

yanked my

hand

loose.

I was still on the floor of the jail cell. I don’t think more than a few seconds had passed. D was still in the doorway and O’Hara was only halfway to me.

“Glughlshresh,” I said.

Wait. That had come out wrong.

“Yerr shon’s a helehash.”

Okay, give it a minute.

“What?’ O’Hara asked.

‘ _Okay, sit up Dualarc. You remember how to do that, right?’_

I did, actually. It was a jerking, painful motion, but I did eventually get upright. My body seemed to be fine. It was my mind that had taken a beating.

“Your. Ssson. Ish. A. Tehelapath,” I said haltingly.

That was the only thing I could think of. Something had been trying to claw its way into my brain and it only ended when I yanked my hand away from the seemingly comatose boy on the bed.

“Rikard? That can’t-“

D strode back into the room and was over Rikard’s prone form before O’Hara finished speaking. His left hand came up and settled onto the boy’s face. A moment passed, and then Rikard began yelling, flailing his arms, and kicking madly.

“Stop!” O’Hara yelled, but D ignored him.

And it became clear why when Rikard _stopped_ , like he’d been frozen. Then he opened his eyes, blinked once and asked, “What happened?”

D pulled away and left the young man sitting there.

“Rikard!” O’Hara shouted. I wondered how long it had been since he had seen his son awake. Did Rikard really spend all the time since his attack sleeping?

“Father? Where are we?” Rikard asked.

What followed was one of those awkward, private conversations that shouldn’t have an audience. Having all of that knowledge dumped on the guy wasn’t easy, but it probably would have been easier if he was not bedridden in a jail cell with two strangers listening in. He took it well enough.

“I’m going to be sick,” Rikard said, and then was. Happily, there was a bucket nearby.

“Do you remember anything about that night?” D asked.

“No,” Rikard said. “Just… fog. Everything’s blurry. I know we were in the basement, I know I shot at something, but it’s like someone told it to me. I know it happened, but I don’t remember it.”

“Probably because you got it out of me,” I said.

Rikard looked confused.

“…You don’t know? Seriously? You dug into my mind like a dog after a bone. How do you not remember that?”

“I never knew I could do that. Are you sure it was something I did?” Rikard asked guilelessly.

“You nearly gave me an aneurism!” I yelled, remembering the horrible pain. “You don’t do something like that on accident!”

“Quiet,” D said. “Rikard, have you ever had reason to think you had mental abilities before today?”

Oh sure, he calls the _other_ teenager by name.

Rikard blinked and lay back onto the bed. “Um, maybe? I’m pretty good at telling what people are feeling and I always know if someone’s nearby.”

“When you were attacked that night, did you fell anything unusual as it happened?”

Hm? Why is he asking that?

Rikard frowned. “Cold. I felt really cold, but that’s nothing unusual. I get cold easily. It’s one of the reasons I usually stay inside. And… tense. I was really wired.”

I’m pretty sure D had meant ‘anything your telepathy picked up’, but that’s just my stupid take on it. It’s been five minutes and I already don’t want to talk to this kid any more. Nothing he says is helpful.

…Wait, is this how D views me? Ugh.

“I’m done here for now,” D said. “I’ll come back if I have any more questions.”

We left the father and son sitting together on the little jail cell bed. Even with the surroundings being what they were, O’Hara just looked so damn happy his son was up and talking. It was kind of nice, actually. I took a minute to just enjoy the sight while D and the sheriff had a short conversation behind me, something about the town priest wanting a word with D when he had the time. It didn’t last long and I tried to keep my eyes on the happy reunion as I left, imprinting the image into my mind. I had seen so much horrible shit the last few months that something like this was something I wanted to keep with me.

Then I walked into the jailhouse door.

D, who had closed it behind him as soon as he made it through the threshold, was still calmly walking away when I opened it up again to follow.

Asshole.

 

* * *

 

 

We were heading to the O’Hara house. Again, it was one of the bigger ones in the town, but that wasn’t saying much. Especially since the house was a shattered wreck. After we passed through the shade of the trees that hung over the walkway to the front entrance, we saw that the front door had been busted down, the fence torn apart, the windows all shattered, and the mailbox knocked over. What? I notice things like that. It meant the vampire was a petty dick. He hadn’t just destroyed the alarm system, he’d gone after their home as well.

D had gained permission from the sheriff and Mr. O’Hara to examine the attack site, but even with that badge of neutrality people still looked at him (and me) with the evil eye. The life of a dhampir, eh? Wonderful. No one actually was brave enough to bother us, though. They all limited themselves to looking at us like we were made of vomit and spit. That only stopped after we left the town proper, the O’Hara house being within the beginnings of the forest that bordered half the area.

Going inside the house was a strange and disturbing experience for me. I can’t really explain why. It had clearly been someone’s home, a place that was lived in and loved, and now it was a mess. Furniture had been thrown everywhere from the living room to the cellar, dents littered the walls, everything small and fragile had been smashed to powder, and dirt had begun to creep in from all the shattered windows. The vampire had been absolutely pissed for whatever reason and he had taken it out on the home before he reached the occupants.

My house, by contrast, had only suffered one broken door lock. Didn’t mean I felt less sick remembering it, though. Hopefully the O’Hara’s would be able to put this behind them, I thought. It was never fun feeling vulnerable in your own home.

The basement was still the worst. The door was gone. We found it at the bottom of the stairs, not too far away from a large bloodstain on the wall. It was human blood and unless O’Hara had been hiding another person in his basement that night, I figured I was looking at the spot where his wife had been murdered. There were empty shells and crossbow bolts littering the floor. Rikard had in fact gotten more than one shot off. Good for him.

“There anything in particular you’re looking for?” I asked.

No answer. It didn’t irritate me that time. I was finally starting to get used to D’s attitude. Either that, or the atmosphere of the house was just too grim and depressing for me to get angry. Oh well, Dualarc. It isn’t like you’ve never been left hanging before. Now, what is here that shouldn’t be, hm?

Well, the basement seemed relatively intact aside from the door and the big disgusting bloodstain. Presumably he vented all his anger on the family at this point. But on the subject of the family, why did he only bite the daughters, and not Rikard, Philip or Diana O’Hara? Was it just personal preference or did something stop him from doing so? I’d bet on the latter. A smart vampire would have either taken the thralls/fledgling vampires with him and passed it off as a monster attack of some other kind, or drained them dry and then burned the house down or something to dispose of the bodies. Then again, maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe the vampire was a sadistic asshole who liked extending the hunt and he’d left the rest of the family around for later sport. Wouldn’t be anything new.

“Is it possible the vampire was driven off by the O’Haras?” I asked aloud. “I don’t think anyone would have shown up to save them and then left without helping them get medical attention.”

“Possibly,” D said. He speaks! “Without any evidence of another party, it would appear that one of the family succeeded in forcing a retreat out of the attacker. Either that, or it left of its own accord after reaching the girls.”

“But why? I mean, it could have just been cruelty, but that seems really stupid to me. It would have been better to turn them all or kill them all, not leave the job unfinished.”

He didn’t answer that. I turned to nag him some more and my voice stilled when I say him looking up at the first floor above us. He had the focused D face on. I shut my mouth and followed his example.

I had begun weaning myself off the serum by taking smaller and smaller doses, finally going completely off of it two or so weeks before the Skethagon case. I probably won’t ever know if using it for so many years had any permanent effects on my development unless I take the time to find a doctor willing to look into it, but as near as I can tell I’m about as healthy as a dhampir can be living on the road. What I call my normal abilities now…. Imagine the worst moment of your life, when you think you’re about to die horribly and every cell in your body gets saturated with adrenaline. You feel like you can knock down a wall, outrun a vehicle, or see a bullet coming at you. Now ramp _that_ up by about twenty times and you have my new baseline abilities when I’m calm. Even those are slowly improving more and more each week. When I actually do get adrenaline pumping in my veins, it gets even crazier. In short, it’s gotten a bit easier to remember that I’m not human.

I had plenty of evidence that D was still a league above me and this was another show of it. It took another few seconds before I could hear the soft footsteps coming towards the house. Interesting. Normally no one wants to come near the site of a vampire attack unless they have to.

D was already going towards the stairs and I followed. Emerging into the dim sunlight of the forest around the house showed a slim, girl-next-door type coming up the walkway. Bright blonde hair, large blue eyes, fair complexion; would’ve been perfect if she hadn’t gasped and taken a step back at the sight of us. Fuck, you’d think D and I carried the black plague or something. Lady, I haven’t drunk anything but plasma tea since my fangs grew back in, I swear!

“Good morning,” I said, after D seemed content to just stand there and stare, like the world’s scariest garden gnome. “I’m Dualarc and this is D. Who are you?”

“I, uh, Bianca. I should go back, I think. I’m sorry for intruding.” And then she not-quite ran away.

…Okay. That happened.

“Was she trying to get into the house?” I asked no one in particular. D had already preformed his unexpected good deed for the week in speaking to me and I had no hopes for a sequel. Sure enough, he didn’t answer; just turned around and went back into the darkness of the house.

“Ah well, silence is golden they say,” I muttered, and then started after Bianca. I could always break into the house later if need be and I was curious as to why she had come out there.

I caught up to the girl easily enough – dhampir speed, yay! – and called out, “Do you have a minute to talk, miss?”

She gave a little jump at my voice that was just enough to send her right foot off balance and land on an exposed tree root. A shriek of surprise and fear, then she was falling.

“Hey!”

I caught her and set her upright. “Careful,” I said smiling. “You could twist your ankle like that.”

My sarcasm-fu may be my greatest strength, but the abilities of politeness-judo are often underestimated. If she was scared of me, then I just had to show her I wasn’t a scary person. Simple enough.

“Don’t _touch_ me!” Bianca yelled and jerked away.

Or not.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said as I retreated. “I didn’t want you to fall, is all.”

“I’d rather get touched by dirt than you! Go away!”

 _Ouch._ You’d think I’d have gotten used to that.

“Sorry,” I said again. “I’ll let you fall next time.” Sarcasm-fu, activate. “Why were you trying to get to the house, though? There’s nothing worth stealing now that it’s all been smashed apart.”

Her pale face goes even whiter. “I wasn’t going to steal anything! I was going to clean it up a bit for Rikard! His ordeal is bad enough as it is; I figured having someone fix up his house would cheer him up a little. Why were you two there?”

“Investigating,” I shrugged. “You know – figure out what happened, where did the vampire go, what abilities does it have, etc. Hunter stuff.”

She looked at me like I was something with too many legs that crawled up onto her shoe. “ _You?_ You’re not a Hunter. You’re just a stupid boy acting like he’s tough. If a monster actually shows up, I bet you’ll run.”

_‘Okay, I do not like you.’_

“Oh, I don’t know. I seem to managing okay right now. Thank you for your time miss. Bye!” And I went back to the house.

“ _Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?!”_ came from behind me, but I ignored it.

I didn’t know what that girl had a stick up her ass about – dhampirs, Rikard being attacked, or both – but someone needed to beat her with it till she got some manners knocked into her.

I spent some time looking around the interior of the house, mostly checking the girls’ bedroom and the basement, before moving on to the outside. About the only things of note I found where that the windows, as far as I could tell with all the broken glass everywhere, had not been forced at any point in the recent past, and that Rikard was _very_ sick. Nothing contagious, but something called cystic fibrosis. I knew it was a genetic disease* that could be fixed up easily enough with the right equipment and doctors, but this little hole of a town was too poor for it. Apparently, going by the primitive medical equipment and texts in Rikard’s room, he had been forced to treat himself for some time now.

If D had found anything else, he didn’t share it with me. After leaving the house, he headed for the pathetic excuse of a church that stood in the town center. I found out why after the priest in charge shakenly led the way down to a dank, stone room beneath the building where they stored dead bodies before the funeral.

Mrs. Diana O’Hara had been a large woman. Not fat, mind you, just large. She was easily six feet tall and with the muscles that come to a woman who has lived and worked in the Frontier her whole life. I could see the remnants of a beautiful woman in her face, though. Take away twenty-five years of stress and I’d have bet that she looked exactly like her daughters, with their auburn hair and cheekbones.

D was looking for something else, though. Ignoring her face, he peered at her neck where it met up with her collarbone. Two tiny puncture wounds decorated the skin there. Somewhat alarmed, I reflexively looked at the staircase leading back up into the open air. Sunlight, bright and reassuring, streamed down into the doorway still.

I turned to glare at the priest who was wringing his hands fretfully.

“What the hell are you thinking? She should be in containment, not stuck behind one unreinforced door!”

“That was my thought too, young sir. We had the body under guard until we could gather the fuel to burn it up, but, well, she never rose during those hours and when I got close enough to take a better look at the wounds in question, I noticed something odd.”

I blinked, not understanding his words. Another glance at the body did nothing to enlighten me. She looked just like any other corpse.

“We do not have a proper mortician here in Toblerone, so I handle the bodies of the deceased and prepare them for their last rites. I’m accustomed to seeing wounds on bodies, what with the accidents in the quarry and the bar fights that spring up from time to time and, well….”

“You were good to notice this,” D murmured. “Most others would have never bothered looking closer.”

“Care to share for the non-morticians and student Hunters in the room?” I asked.

D, perhaps taking pity on me (hah!), gently turned Mrs. O’Hara’s head as much a rigor mortis would allow and pointed at her wounds.

“It’s the bite mark, young sir,” the little old priest continued on behind me. “There was no indication of the body ever trying to heal from it. There would be, you know, even if it only occurred a few seconds before Mrs. O’Hara’s death.”

That was when it clicked for me.

“…Why would a vampire bother to bite someone who had already died?”

“A very good question,” D acknowledged, gently setting the sheet over Mrs. O’Hara’s face once more.


	19. Is It Mystery or Horror?

They’d bitten her after she’d died?

Why?

There was some fundamental difference between blood from a living and a dead human. That was why artificial blood never worked out for very long on Nobles who tried to go without attacking humans for whatever reason. Sooner or later the urge to get the real article just couldn’t be ignored anymore. Fake or dead blood didn’t do anything for the Noble who drank it, so why bother?

Simple solution: it wasn’t a Noble who bit her. Someone’s just trying to make it look like it was.

Again, why?

Here’s a better question: what killed her?

“Were there any other possible causes of death?” D asked. Is he telepathic too?

“Oh yes,” the priest said. “Mrs. O’Hara was known to have a weak heart. I suppose she could have had a heart attack during the assault on her home. It could also have been some kind of poison. We can only check for so many toxins with our equipment and I only recently noticed the problem with the official cause of death. I haven’t had much time to look into it, I’m afraid.”

Great. So we have no idea what killed the woman or who.

“Do you at least have a time of death?” I asked. If the cause was suspect, maybe the time was too. O’Hara did not say he had any idea as to how long he had been unconscious. Could someone have come in after the vampire, killed Diana as she lay there injured, and then tried to cover it up?

“Mmhm, yes. By the rate of decay, I’d say she died at around 1:30 a.m., September 8th.”

So, the same night that O’Hara’s household had been attacked and at about the same time. Maybe I was wrong?

“Never mind,” I mumbled, feeling deflated. So much for my second killer theory. No one, no matter how stupid, would go into a house immediately after they saw a vampire leaving it while it was still night time.

D asked the priest to do a more thorough autopsy as soon as he could and then left, me trailing behind him like always. The sun was starting to set by then. Wherever the vampire was, if there even was a vampire, they would be stirring soon. I’d have thought D would head back to the jail and begin working to fortify the place against attack. I was half right.

The sheriff was ready to clear out when we arrived. He said he figured he would be more hindrance than help if the monster got inside and, honestly, he was probably right. This guy was not sheriff Mervin, ready to throw down with bears for a bit of exercise. His red eyes and yellow skin told me he spent more time with the whiskey I could smell in his desk than out enforcing the law and safety of the town. He left D the keys to the jailhouse and cleared out in five minutes flat.

Turns out D’s idea of prepping for an attack is to sharpen his sword a bit. No, seriously, that’s it. No traps, no wards, just a whetstone and patience. He did something to both of the girls, though I wasn’t able to see it. He just laid his left hand on both of them and said they’d sleep through any summons the vampire tried to use on them.

After that, we waited.

“How come you two are still here?” I asked Mr. O’Hara. “This place is going to be under attack soon. Was there nowhere you could have been moved to?”

“Not really,” O’Hara said. “We don’t have much in the way of secure holding facilities here. Too poor to make ‘em. Even though Rikard and I can both walk in daylight, no one wanted to take the chance that we’d sprout fangs while out of the cells. And, frankly, I think this is their way of getting even. If we survive this night, they might be more inclined to go easy on our punishment after.”

He was talking about his concealment of the vampire attack. It was harsh, but that was Frontier justice for you. The man had put his whole town at risk and this was to be his trial by fire. If he lived to see the monster die, they’d let it be. If not, he’d pay for it with his life.

The optimum time for a vampire attack is between eleven and two o’clock in the morning. With most Frontier homesteads going to bed around 8 o’clock so they could rise before dawn, this was the time most people were dead to the world. Sleeping so heavily, there was less chance they would wake up during the attack. However, there wasn’t any chance of this vampire catching us sleeping. D had ordered the lights off and told the two O’Haras to remain still and act like they were sleeping, or better yet to actually go to sleep, but there was no chance of that. I was getting more wired by the minute, feeling every second tick by.

At ten thirty, D put his sword back in the sheath and the whetstone into his pocket. I don’t know why he even bothered, it had already looked sharp enough to chop through stone without much trouble. He was easily the calmest person in the room. None of my spastic twitching or the fast breathing from the cell.

“Do you really think it’ll come here tonight?” I finally asked, unable to bear the silence anymore. “It’s been a few nights now and there haven’t been any more attacks. How do you know it didn’t take off?”

More to the point, how do you know it even exists?

D gave me a cool look (translation: stop talking you idiot), but decided to answer me. “Frankly, I don’t. If they don’t show up tonight, I’ll have to start assuming they fled. That means going on a hike. However, it came for the girls three times before now, even though the last visit meant a fight. I believe the vampire is simply waiting.”

“For what?”

“A better opportunity.”

“You mean, like having the entire town find out about the attack and staking the family out like goats for a wolf?” Rikard said quietly from his cell.

D glanced over at the young man and did not bother to deny it.

Rikard laughed bitterly. “Of course. Gotta love our neighbors….”

Mr. O’Hara frowned at his son. “Rikard, you know why they’re doing this. We shouldn’t have hidden it from them and if this all goes well we don’t want them having any hard feelings against us.”

“I know why they did it, but that doesn’t make me okay with it,” Rikard snapped. “It’s always been like this. Communities are supposed to band together in hard times, but whenever there’s a rockslide in the quarry or someone needs medicine in a hurry or mom has to miss out on her job as teacher, do you see anyone else offering to pick up the slack and help us? No. I’m the only one in this damn town who bothered to really learn medicine and nobody else can be bothered to put up with a bunch of kids for six hours, so if we can’t get the job done then we get blamed when it gets worse. Even if we had come clean from the start, do you think we would have gotten help? I bet this would have happened anyway.”

“You don’t know that,” O’Hara said softly.

Rikard huffed and rolled over to turn his back on his father.

O’Hara sighed and leaned back against the wall.

D continued sitting quietly.

I tried and failed to find another bottle of alcohol hidden in the desk.

…Don’t look at me like that. I’m poor and having some alcohol in my meager medical supplies could come in handy.

It was coming up on midnight when the vampire came. The disgusting thing _did_ exist, as it turned out.

It had some vague notion of caution, something which the previous assault on the O’Hara house had left me doubting. Instead of going into berserker mode and trying to force its way in, it tried sending us all to sleep first. I didn’t notice anything wrong at first. Rikard and O’Hara had both dropped off to sleep, their breathing evening out and heartbeats slowing, but it had been a few stressful hours and they were humans. Nocturnal hours were meant for sleep as far as their bodies were concerned.

With D and me it was different. Although we had human blood, we naturally preferred the night. Even with all the trekking around I had done earlier throughout the town, I should not have gotten so tired so suddenly after sunset. I frowned and rubbed at my eyes. It didn’t make them stop aching.

_‘What the hell?’_

Then both O’Hara girls’ breathing starting to speed up. That was enough to make my heart rate pick up. The lethargy faded somewhat, but it was still affecting me. The men were asleep, but the girls were waking up. How? It couldn’t be anything chemical, at least nothing that I knew of. If that were the case it wouldn’t be affecting me as well, right? My biology was different from theirs. Maybe it was a mental attack. Yes, it had to be some kind of hypnosis. So, in that case….

I grabbed hold of my cheeks and pinched as hard as I could.

There are two ways to get rid of most mental intrusions. The first and more impressive of the two is to use your own willpower to overpower that of the caster. In effect, you take control of the illusion and whatever you do to them becomes real. I had never tried that before and doing so in the middle of a vampire attack seemed like a fantastically stupid idea. The second method is to ground yourself back into the physical world with bodily sensations. The most common way of doing this? Self-inflicted pain.

I was wide awake in a moment. The hypnosis slipped off of me like an unbuttoned coat. I could hear someone stepping very, very softly around the wall of the jail. It was coming closer to the door. I growled and tightened my hands into fists. The heavy leather of my fighting gloves creaked. The footsteps stopped suddenly.

From behind me where D sat, a hoarse voice sighed. “Oh, you dumb amateur.”

Huh?

Then the door was kicked in.

What came through was a seven foot tall, rail thin, cadaver looking thing with glowing red eyes. It was dressed in clothes that had been quite fine at one point, but that point was long gone. The faded, ripped black trousers and evening jacket gave off an aroma reminiscent of a rotting carcass. It was the smell of a grave.

Without any fanfare the vampire immediately lunged at me. His right hand swung at my head in a fist.

_‘Dodge!’_

I stepped into the blow, ignoring the revolting smell and the incredible urge to look away from the grotesque sight of his skeletal face. His left arm came towards my gut, long fingernails hooked into claws.

_‘Divert!’_

My right hand locked around his left wrist and pulled, changing the path of the strike to go beyond me instead of through me. My left hand formed a fist and went straight up. His jaw opened wide and came straight down.

_‘Strike!’_

My fist reached his nose before his fangs could reach my head and – miracle of miracles – I felt the bone beneath my knuckles shatter satisfyingly. His head rocked back and black blood flew through the air. Then his head reversed direction, came back down and his jaw wrapped around my fist.

_‘Panic!’_

I shoved my hand in deeper. There was no way I could pull it out without losing a few fingers, but if I stretched his jaw to the breaking point it would reduce a lot of his biting power. More importantly, I immediately received certain proof that vampires still have a gag reflex. This is science, people!

Something warm and wet surged up around my fist and the vampire backpedaled as quickly as he could to get away from the pressure of my hand. I followed, shoving forward, and jabbing out with my free hand. I caught him hard in the torso. He fell over, still with my hand in his mouth, damn it, and I had to fall with him in order to avoid losing pieces of myself to his teeth.

You might notice that I had made a lot of stupid choices during this exchange. I fully acknowledge this. The worst one had to be that I stopped paying attention to his hands when we fell, though.

His nails caught me deep in my side and then traveled across my gut, tearing skin apart in their wake and spilling my blood all over the floor.

There are no words I know of that can describe what that felt like.

My vision went white. Something grabbed my coat and threw me. I hit the floor and that opened up a whole new world of pain. I’m fairly certain the only reason my guts didn’t come spilling out of me was because I had the instinctive urge to cover up my wound with an arm, which also put pressure on it. I could still – sort of – hear what was going on. It was kind of fading in and out. The biggest thing that I could make out was the smell of blood and rot.

The sound of steel rasping against something.

“Are…you…the…main…course…then?”

Wet sounds.

“Boy…tastes…good. Will…you?”

Sudden movement. No more rot smell. The floor rattled with force.

_‘…It said I had… tasted good. …Did it… drink my… blood off its hand? Ew.’_

Something crashed against a wall. The vampire screamed, shrill and frightened. Its severed arm flopped to the floor in front of my face. I could see it, albeit very dimly. The nails, dark with my blood, clicked reflexively against the hardwood boards.

“Master!” A girl’s… no, two girls’ voices at once.

Pain. _So_ much pain.

I had to move. There was a fight nearby and I was just waiting to be tripped over.

I started crawling. The fighting was behind me, so I just had to move away from it. The cells were in front of me. I had to stay away from the one on the left. The girls were there and they’d probably be happy to finish me off for their boss. The guys’ cell should have been okay, though.

I reached the bars and gripped them to haul myself closer. It was a bit easier than dragging myself along with my hands and knees. I leaned against the cell door, taking a moment to catch my breath. Well, really I was trying to breathe as little as possible. Every time I did, fire exploded in my gut and chest. That probably wasn’t going away anytime soon. Damn, I thought.

The vampire was quiet now. Had D won? The fighting seemed to have stopped. I turned to look behind me. Beyond the dark, wet trail that led to my current position, there was a big hole in the wall.

_‘…Well, that explains why I can’t hear them anymore.’_

It had probably tried to bail after losing the arm. Good luck with that, jackass. D’s gonna chop you into tiny little pieces and set them on fire for good measure. I’ll come laugh at your body later, too.

I pressed my face against the bars, trying to use the cold to wake myself up a bit. The room was starting to spin and my vision was fading out again. Neither of those things had good implications. I didn’t want to pass out until I knew it was safe. Even if the vampire didn’t come back, the two thralls next to me just needed to get loose from their cell and I’d be dead meat pretty quick.

Speaking of, they were being oddly quiet….

I turned my head to look at the cell next door and saw Rikard’s eyes staring at me from the corner of my vision.

Rikard, who should still have been under the spell of hypnosis.

Did that mean the vampire was dead after all?

I turned my head a few degrees further, looking fully at the bed prone boy. I started to say something, I don’t really remember what, when the migraine from before came back with a vengeance.

Then there was nothing but black.


	20. Under the Influence

I woke up in agony.

Why the fuck was this my life?

I had been moved from the floor to a bench on the side of the jailhouse. My coat and shirt were both gone, and I had about a kilometer of bandages wrapped around my gut. They were stained brown and stank of old blood. Looking at them made my stomach flip-flop and I lowered my head back onto the bench, closing my eyes.

Two heartbeats nearby, besides my own, neither of them D’s. Fuck, had he already taken off? I couldn’t run after him like normal. Scent said both were men. One was a bit sharp smelling, so probably the alcohol drenched sheriff. The other… who? Seemed familiar, but I couldn’t….

“Hello there? Are you awake?”

Footsteps came close to me and then stopped. I knew the voice, but the name escaped me. I opened my eyes a tiny bit. A pale face stared down at me from the dim light of the jailhouse. I knew that face. He was the boy in the cell from the night before. Why couldn’t I remember his name?

“Do you feel alright?”

“Been better,” I responded. My throat felt like it had been vigorously scratched with sandpaper and I was thirsty. Like, this-is-dangerous thirsty. The sheriff came over to stand next to the boy and I felt saliva beginning to pool in my mouth. Ew. “Can someone give me a hand up?” I asked.

Very gingerly, the sheriff got me to stand. Strangely, most of the pain this caused came from my head. My gut was a bit sore, but didn’t do more than give a few pained twinges as I flexed it. I was a little afraid of what that might mean. What I knew about vampire and dhampir biology was pretty limited.

“Where’s D?” was the first thing that came out of my mouth.

If they said he had already collected his payment and rode off, I was going to scream.

“Tracking the vampire from last night,” familiar boy said. I remembered two enthralled girls, May and June. I remembered their father and dead mother. Why couldn’t I remember his name? Who was he? “It managed to get away after making a new hole in the jailhouse wall. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

Okay, so I wasn’t going to have to go on a run with my stomach stapled. Good to know. Second question, “What was your name again?”

He blinked, looking confused. “Um, Rikard. I told you before. Don’t you remember?”

“No,” I said bluntly. That bothered me. I was pretty good with names and faces, so why didn’t I remember? I’d only met him a day before.

“Ah well, don’t worry about it. You did get attacked pretty savagely only a while ago. Maybe the shock made you forget a few things.”

…Maybe?

That….

…That was actually a better explanation than anything I had.

Actually, why did my head hurt so much? It couldn’t be just because I bumped it –

“Anyway,” Rikard said with forced cheer, “you should probably go back to sleep. The sheriff let me use some medicine on your wound, but you still lost a lot of blood. Don’t want to keel over again, right?”

Good idea. It had one problem, though. I didn’t think I needed rest.

“Hey, hey, what are you doing?!”

That was Rikard yelling as I pulled at the bandages wrapped around my middle. My stomach didn’t hurt and none of the blood I could smell was fresh. It was almost like… well, it sounded insane, but it felt like I wasn’t injured. Then I finally got the bandages far enough away from my skin to see for myself. I should have been surprised, but for some reason, I wasn’t. I had healed almost completely. Dried blood covered my belly with a dark brown crust, but there was no wound.

…The _hell?!_

I tore the bandages away in one motion and ran my fingers over what should have been an intestine oozing mess. The skin was a bit sensitive and little flashes of pain arced like lightning across my gut, but that was all. I had been almost disemboweled not even a day ago and now it just felt like I’d gotten a belly button infection. How? I mean, I wasn’t complaining about it, let’s be clear there, but _how?!_

Wait. Something like this had happened before. Back during the Skethagon affair (what was the name of the town I’d actually been in? I couldn’t remember that either…), I had gotten impaled through the chest and woken up the next day without a hitch. I’d been frantic to catch up with D so I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but that was odd. Even for a dhampir, I don’t think I should have healed that fast. At the time, I could have chalked it up to getting decent treatment at the hospital, but what if that wasn’t it? What if I just naturally healed this fast now?

_‘If that’s true… I never have to pay a doctor’s bill again! Sweet!’_

Look, I try to stay positive.

Cackling gleefully, I looked for my clothes. I found them draped over the sheriff’s chair, torn and bloody. Whatever. I’d clean up later. For now, I had shit to do.

“Wait, you shouldn’t be moving so much!” Rikard protested.

“Do you want to die?” The sheriff was a bit blunter.

“I’m fine, honest,” I laughed. It was mostly true. My head still ached like I’d tried using it to knock down a house, but that was all. It would probably be worse when I left the dim light of the jailhouse and stepped into actual (if also dim) sunlight, but that was what I had my sunglasses for. “I want to catch up with D before he kills the vampire.”

Because a wounded vampire in the daylight was probably my safest option for seeing an actual hunt. I had no idea when or if this chance would come again, and no way was I missing out on it.

“Thanks for helping me goodbye now I’ll catch you later,” I rattled off as fast as I could. I burst out of the door and into the sunlight. For once I didn’t mind that it burned. Almost bleeding to death on a hick jailhouse floor makes a guy appreciate beautiful things, you know?

Following the trail from the jailhouse was not hard. D and the vampire hadn’t been trying to be stealthy and all I had to do was go along with the destruction. It painted a line from the town to the forest. Once in the forest, the path of slashed tree trunks, fallen branches, upturned earth and such was just as easy to see. Either the vampire had been fighting like a madman (likely) or D was the one who cut loose (unlikely). My money was on the vampire because, frankly, I would probably lose my shit too if D was chasing me with intent to kill and had already taken one of my arms.

Ah well, it probably hadn’t done him any good.

Mind you, if that was the case, where was D? I couldn’t imagine killing one injured vampire would take that long. Nor for that matter would catching it. Just how fast was it to have managed to get this far with D after it?

I followed the damage trail for almost a full mile. Apparently the answer to my question was _very_ fast. It stopped at the mouth of a cave, which had a pair of white stone pillars on either side of it. Better, and stranger, D was just standing there in front of it.

“Good morning, Mr. Broody,” I hailed. “What are you standing around out here for?”

D glanced at me, blinked and then went back to studying the mouth of the cave. Ah, consistency.

My headache hadn’t abated by then. If anything, it was getting worse. D had that effect, it seemed.

I squinted into the darkness of the cave. My eyes were pretty amazing, but even I couldn’t see more than fifty or so feet into it before the darkness covered everything. What I could make out was a trail of black blood and messy footprints in the dirt.

“So, he actually got away from you? Wow,” I muttered. I mean, I knew Hunters screwed up on the job sometimes, but D? I had kind of thought he was infallible. Well, shows what I knew.

Actually, why wasn’t D still pursuing?

I considered asking, but I had a plethora of evidence that that wouldn’t get me a decent explanation. So….

Look around, Dualarc. What do you see? One Hunter, top tier in his profession, not chasing his prey into the cave despite knowing it is wounded and tired. One cave, which the vampire apparently knew to get to since the trail was basically a straight line here. And two pillars at the entrance, one on either side, that looked strangely immaculate for being in the dim forest for who knew how long.

I considered all of this, bent down, picked up a rock, and threw it towards the cave entrance.

It exploded as it passed between the pillars, the tiny chunks that remained coming back to pelt me.

Well, that answered that.

I looked over D again. How long had he been trying to figure out a way passed these things? I would have just looked for another way in.

I stepped closer to D, my fingers pulling one of my stakes loose from my bag. I flipped it up and caught it. Maybe I could use this to destroy one of the pillars? Wouldn’t know until I tried.

“So, how did it get away from you anyway? I’d have thought you would have killed it there in town.”

“Some kind of special-distorting technique,” D answered. Strange, but welcome. “I had to – “

My fist, with the stake clutched firmly in my fingers, slammed point first into the back of his heart with every ounce of strength I could muster up using only one arm. He didn’t scream, didn’t collapse, just grunted and in the same moment slammed his left elbow back into my nose. Anybody else probably would have gone through a tree or five, but I’d already anchored my feet to the ground and just let my upper body take the blow. I bent backwards and reached for his feet. He wasn’t there anymore. He was in front of me as I came back up, his sword coming down and -

**_CRUNCH!_ **

 

* * *

 

 

I woke up and my headache was gone.

This time I very distinctly remembered what had happened and wondered at why that was.

I was lying flat on my back on the forest floor, D crouching over me. His left hand was covering my face, but he drew it off as I opened my eyes. His right hand was still holding his sword. I could smell blood and saw a bloody stake a few feet away, but he didn’t seem to be in pain. How?

“Do you feel better now?” D asked.

“I should be asking you that,” I responded, sitting up gingerly. My hands came up to my head, carefully feeling around my hairline. I definitely remembered the sword coming down and hitting me – not cutting me – right around there. The fact that he hadn’t been aiming to kill was strange enough. How had he managed to knock me out without a scratch and fix what was wrong from earlier?

“My headache is gone,” I said slowly. My mind was racing a mile a minute, trying to figure out _what in the fuck_ had just happened. I had been thinking about how to get into the cave and then somehow gone to murdering D without a single hitch in my mind or body.

“I was actually trying to kill you,” I said (perhaps unwisely, given that D was still well within decapitating range). “Why was I trying to kill you, no, wait, stupid question. I got mind controlled, didn’t I?”

“So far as I can tell, yes,” D said. “Although you seemed to be resisting it well enough. Do you remember anyone telling you to kill me?”

“What’d you…? D, _I didn’t resist it_! I put one of my stakes through your back,” I reminded him.

If that bothered him, he didn’t show it. D stood up and sheathed his sword, turning away from me. I guess I wasn’t considered a threat again.

“You struck me from behind, aiming for my heart at a moment when I was not on my guard against you,” D said in his usual low voice. “If you were not fighting the command subconsciously, why am I alive? You only hit me hard enough to pierce the stake two inches deep. Any further and I would have been in trouble, but it seems your arm stopped in time.”

…I had what? I thought I’d hit him as hard as I could. Had I really held back some?

“Moreover, you say you had a headache? With no physical injury that typically means a mental conflict; in your case, defiance against an intruder. How long have you had it?”

“Not long,” I murmured, thinking back. “It was in the jailhou – “

I _froze._

Rikard, leaning down at me as I woke up.

Rikard, who had been staring at me when he should have been asleep.

Rikard, who had ripped into my mind before.

Rikard.

_The fucking telepathic thrall!_

“Oh, I am going to _kill that little **bastard!**_ ” I spat, rage flooding my blood like scalding hot water. My canines were definitely getting longer, I could feel the tips grazing my lower gums, but here was time when I honestly didn’t care.

“The O’Hara boy, then?” D asked from somewhere beyond my notice.

I nodded, my anger growing beyond words. That sick little shit had been in my _head_! He’d forced orders onto me and nearly gotten me killed! Nearly made me kill D!

“He’s likely gone by now. Still, we may get lucky,” D said.

I didn’t wait for him. I took off running through the forest as fast as I could. Trees blurred past me and I ducked underneath their branches where they reached for me. I felt so stupid. Nothing about the jailhouse had been right in hindsight. Where had the girls and the father gone? They had been missing when I woke up, I knew that now. I mean, I had noticed at the time that only Rikard and the sheriff were there with me, but it hadn’t _mattered_. And why had Rikard been out of the cell? The vampire wasn’t dead yet, which meant he was still dangerous. And fuck, he’d been the one to put me down last night, hadn’t he? I’d been fine… okay, I’d been _conscious_ until I’d noticed him staring at me. Then the migraine that had finished me off came down like the finger of God, probably to keep me from saying anything about it to D while he was there.

Shit, D chasing after the vampire was probably the only reason I was still alive. He’d wanted someone to make sure the Hunter wasn’t going to be killing his master and there I was, a dhampir that D had been traveling with. If he’d known how little D actually relied on or liked me, I probably would have died there on the floor when no one was watching.

I came out of the trees at a dash, bounding past a startled dog that tripped over itself trying to follow my movement. The jailhouse was in front of me seconds later. I already knew what I would find before I opened the door – Rikard and the sheriff both gone – but I wanted to get a better look inside the building. Even if I didn’t find a clue as to where they had gone, maybe I could find something to explain what had happened to the others O’Haras.

My anger, which had been denied a justifiable release at Rikard’s absence, was instead taken out on the furniture. I threw the drawers of the sheriff’s desk to the floor, shattering the bottle of whiskey that had indeed been in there. Papers were scattered everywhere. When the desk offered nothing else, I threw it against the wall. The jailhouse cell doors were next. I wrenched off the one that had held the daughters only yesterday and bent it in half before slamming it to the ground. Inside there was nothing, not even a hair left on either bed. Growling deeply, I turned to leave and found D standing in front of the cell opening.

“You need to calm down,” he said.

I knew that in my head, but my gut had other ideas. I still burned with the need to wring Rikard’s scrawny little neck for what he’d done to me. Abusing the town’s property wasn’t the most ethical outlet, but it was better than going on a screaming rampage through the streets, right?

“I’ll calm down when I snap that bastard’s neck!” I shouted. “He almost got me killed and you too, in case you’ve forgotten!”

“I haven’t,” D replied. His voice was as level as ever. “But you are causing a scene. There is nothing more to be gained here and I don’t think you have the money or skill to repair all of this, do you?”

Well, he had me there. ‘You break it, you fix it’ was a pretty good deterrent when you had no idea how to fix it.

 _‘Okay, just treat it like a breathing exercise_ ,’ I thought.

One in, long, hold it, then out slow.

And again.

And again.

And I was somewhat sane again.

“Okay,” I gritted out between my definitely-too-big teeth. “What do you suggest?”

D gave me A Look, letting me know with a glance just how stupid me asking him for advice was.

Then he defied all expectations and actually gave me a decent answer.

“How about you start with what happened when I left the jail in pursuit of the vampire last night?”

 

* * *

 

 

So, I told him. I left out the part about me crawling pathetically across the floor, my guts one little jostle away from escaping my skin. I told him about how the girls had refrained from even trying to go after me and how Rikard, though not his father, had been awake and staring at me. About how he had psychically attacked me the moment he realized the jig was up.

It went into theory after that. I was fairly certain he had kept me alive and let my wounds heal so he could brainwash me into backstabbing D like I had, but I didn’t know if he had implemented other commands. My headache had disappeared after following the ‘kill D’ order and he had been trying to get me to go back to sleep, so I was fairly certain that was the only thing he had had time to get into me. I wasn’t sure, however. I had been alone with him for several hours, after all.

“So, that’s my story,” I finished. “What happened with you?”

D had driven the vampire to charge straight through the wall and into the night. Pursuing it, he had gone into the woods and harassed the beleaguered monster through the trees, creating that oh-so-easily-followable trail I had found. Then the cave had opened up in front of them. The vampire went running through, D only a tiny bit behind him. The force field came to life just in the nick of time, melting the tip off D’s blade just before it could skewer the vampire from behind. Then, from apparently out of nowhere, a whole contingent of security drones had appeared. Like, from thin air. There was my old friend space warping technology again. They could somehow mess with the area between them and D, ensuring none of his strikes could reach them. Something similar had stopped most of D’s strikes on the vampire earlier. He’d had to retreat to find a way to deal with them, then doubled back to find a way into the cave. That had been right around the time I’d shown up.

I’d been paying rapt attention to his story, I swear, but I’d also been trying to think of where the missing O’Hara family and the sheriff could have gone. It was daylight, someone should have seen something.

Why, then, was there no hue and cry as to the escaped prisoners walking down the street?

“Do you have any idea how they got away?” I asked. They couldn’t have just walked out, not if no one was running to find the Hunter and tell him the thrall was going thatta way. I couldn’t smell much beyond the old scent of my own blood and the sharp scent of alcohol that had settled into the floor and walls.

“Some,” D admitted. I couldn’t believe he was still talking to me. This was a new record for conversations with him. “You should leave town, though.”

Oh fuck, I’d jinxed it.

“We’ve had this talk a few times now,” I snapped. “I’m not leaving you until you agree to teach me.”

“Your irritating habit of shadowing me aside, I meant it for another reason,” D responded coolly. “You were nearly killed for the second time last night and suffered a mental attack on top of that. I sincerely doubt you are at what passes for one hundred percent with you. The danger is only going to get worse at this point and the next fight you get into may well be the one that finishes you.”

All good points.

“No,” I said.

“Your decision,” D murmured, finally standing up from the wall he had been leaning against. He headed outside without another word.

“Like I’m leaving, jackass, should know he’s not gonna fool me like that, he thinks I’m dumb, I’ll show em,” I muttered continuously as I followed after him. He could almost certainly hear every word of it and I didn’t care.

Back out in the overcast sunlight, I jogged up to D’s side and started pestering him with questions. If he was in a talky mood, it was better to get as much out of it as I still could.

“Why do you think the fighting’s going to get worse? You’ve already come close to killing the vampire once. Tomorrow night should see it through to the end, yeah?”

Without any kind of warning or preamble, “Exactly how many people have you seen in direct sunlight since coming to this town?” D asked.

…Eh?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of what I've written so far. I'll add more later as it comes.


	21. Approaching The Truth

He could not possibly mean what I thought he meant.

But like a good little student-hopeful, I listened to the question and gave it the worth it was due.

So, we’d met the sheriff first and he had… actually been in the jailhouse the whole time. Huh.

All right, the O’Haras were next, but they were also in the jailhouse.

Then the girl at the O’Hara house, wait… no, not her either. The trees had blocked most of the light, leaving the atmosphere dim. And the priest had been down in the cellar, had stayed down there as D and I left.

And… that was it.

I knew people stayed inside when there was trouble, but suddenly it seemed very creepy how very few townspeople I had seen. Even with the vampire attacks, there had been villagers out and about in the town near Skethagon. Maribelle, the sheriff, his deputies, the doctors and nurses of the hospital, the store owners, etc. Here? Now that I was actually thinking about it, I’d seen less than ten people in two days. At least five of them had been vampire victims of some kind.

Well, _fuck_.

“How many people do you think have been turned?” I asked quietly.

“At this point? I’d say at least half the town,” D answered nonchalantly.

I almost stumbled in my stride. He couldn’t be serious. For a town this size, that had to mean at least forty people.

I turned to glare at him, but then stopped. It was D. He was _always_ serious.

Well, time to go sharpen more stakes, I thought. This was all going to end in tears.

 

* * *

 

We started doing house to house searches immediately after that. Knocking on people’s doors and asking them to step out into the sunlight. Some agreed, but most didn’t. Said that they weren’t doing a damned thing unless the sheriff was there with us and he obviously wasn’t. I solved that problem by making the next sentence a command instead of a request. Most still told me to fuck off. I finally took the situation out of their hands entirely, kicked down a few doors and dragged the occupants screaming into the sunlight. Making friends and solutions at the same time, you see.

The thing was, there weren’t nearly enough people in those houses.

D had, as per usual, been spot on with his estimate. Almost half the houses I invaded were empty and cold. No one seemed to have been in them for days. It was almost noon by the time we finished and I tracked D down to the town square, or what passed for it there anyway. Just a well with a ring of empty space around it.

“You called it,” I sighed as I sat down against the well. “Twenty-one houses and nine of them were completely empty. Fuck, what a mess.”

I’d checked over the photos and registries in the houses where I’d could find them. Assuming there were no undocumented people in those houses, we were looking at about forty-two possible vampires. Newborn, hopefully weakling vampires, but still.

“There are only a few hours left until nightfall. We’ve gotta tell people to bail or barricade themselves in. I don’t think we’re gonna be able to get a hunting posse out of these pissants,” I said miserably.

“Agreed,” said a hoarse voice, but there was no one else when I turned my head to look.

“Why does that keep happening?” I asked D, but he ignored me.

“If you want to help, then spread the word. I am going to try entering the cave once more. If I cannot, then I will return,” D said.

“How are you going to get in oh, okay, goodbye then,” I waved as he walked off. I was used to it by then. And hey, I had stuff to do.

The villagers were not happy about seeing me in their doorways again, which I blamed entirely on their bullheaded refusal to talk to a ragged, blood-covered, shouting stranger who had already manhandled them into the street once before. Still, most of them knew that I had come into town with D and assumed that I was working with him by virtue of that association, even though it still wasn’t technically true. Even the most stubborn listened up pretty damn quick when I mentioned ‘vampires’ and ‘where the fuck have half your neighbors gone?’ Incredibly, only a few seemed to have any inkling of how many people were missing and even they just thought that the missing people had been sick or maybe took off without telling anyone. The more I listened to those people talk, the worse my gut feeling became. Rikard had mentioned the night before that the town wasn’t really a close-knit community but _fuck_ , this was just unreasonable.

How much of this was just apathy and how much was mind fuckery? I had no idea how powerful Rikard was, but influencing a hundred or so people at once would have taken some measure of skill. If he could have done all this, how did he fuck up controlling me as much as he did? But if he didn’t, then how had these blind, deaf and dumb people lived this long?

Unsurprisingly, none of them wanted to fight. The general air of shabbiness that I had noticed about the town extended to their fighting spirit. They did immediately begin fortifying their homes and bringing out all the weapons they had, but even that had grumbling to it, like preparing for imminent danger was almost too much bother. 

The weapons they brought to bear were standard Frontier arms; pickaxes, swords, hammers, a few cartridge loading firearms, some bows and the odd polearm or two. They were good for scaring off animals and the occasional bandit, but when I remembered how Zefula had torn through the hospital wall and how the thrall animals of the forest had kept coming without feeling pain or fear until I struck them with a killing blow, I sincerely hoped D was going to kill the vampire before everything went to hell.

 

* * *

 

D did not, in fact, kill the vampire before everything went to hell.

He came back about an hour before sunset and took up residence at the center of the town by the well. By then, I had gotten the villagers ready in their homes for an invasion and torn through the empty houses trying to find any of the missing people with no luck.

“Well, this is going wonderfully,” I muttered, sliding down the side of the well to sit on the earth. D said nothing, but I was complaining more than conversing.

“Still haven’t found Rikard, or any of the O’Haras, or the sheriff, or any of the missing people. Still haven’t killed the vampire, so I hope you didn’t have plans for that reward. Still not sure what’s going on, because things are weird about everything lately.”

_Lots_ of things bothered me about this scenario. Why had Rikard been able to walk under sunlight if he was a thrall? Why had he risked making me into a mind-slave instead of killing me and blaming it on my wound? Why was Mrs. O’Hara sporting a pair of holes in her neck when she hadn’t died from them? How had over forty people disappeared in less than a week and their neighbors not only didn’t notice but didn’t care? Where had the sheriff scampered off to? Where had _everyone_ scampered off to, actually? That Bianca chick was not among the still living townspeople I’d talked to today.

…Wait a minute….

“She was trying to get into the O’Hara house,” I said slowly. _Why_ had she been trying to get into the O’Hara house? I’d thought she was being a bitch because I was a dhampir, but if I’d been preventing her from carrying out some kind of order….

“Going investigating, be back in a minute,” I said. This was less out of a belief that D cared where I went and more out of a desire to remind myself to get back to the well before the sun set.

The O’Hara house was still a wreck. What was new was the open door leading to Rikard’s room, which I distinctly remembered as being shut when I had passed it last time. Going inside, I saw a small bed, a bookcase below the window that was weighed down with a variety of books and a desk on the far wall with chemistry equipment set on top. It looked like it had been used recently, too.

What had been made? There were jars for willow, ginkgo, and honey, with gelatin powder nearby. Everything else was still in the racks, but those were sitting together on the desk and… yep, some willow powder was loose on the desktop. These things were kitchen remedies though; not high power medicines, but things you’d use for a bit of comfort and relief. I saw stronger herbs sitting untouched. Why had someone risked coming into a vampire victim’s house for these?

…Unless there was nowhere else to get them. Hadn’t Rikard said he always made medicine for the town? But even that seemed wrong, because it was still just some antihistamines and painkillers. Thralls typically got a bit stronger than normal, a bit tougher than normal, when they were bitten. No thrall would need medi….

….

….

…Oh.

_Oh._

No, that was….

…Possible.

It was _possible_.

But why?

And how?

I remembered the bloodstain in the basement, the human blood sprayed along the wall near the stairs. I’d seen it back when I still assumed Mrs. O’Hara had died of a violent vampire attack. I’d thought it was just a mark from when it had dropped her against the wall after draining its fill of her. But the priest had said she had died before being bitten, so that couldn’t have been right. Unless the priest was lying. I hadn’t seen him in sunlight. Hell, even if he had, mind control could still make a liar out of him.

_But if I was right…!_

I tore out of the house as fast as I could. The church was only a few hundred yards away, but the sun was sinking out of sight and I didn’t want to be trapped in a tiny little building when the moon came out. I went in through the front door and charged up to the priest’s office behind the lectern.

“Hey, father! Father!” I yelled.

“Um, yes? What can I – “ At which point he opened the door and I started yelling at his face instead.

“I need to see Diana O’Hara’s body again! Is it still downstairs?”

“Well, yes, drawer 2B,” and he was still talking when I left, but I didn’t really care at that point.

Huh. I guess that’s how D feels when I talk to him.

The room was dark, but dark is relative when you’re me. I could see well enough to easily find the correct drawer and pull it open. Mrs. O’Hara was mostly unchanged from the night before. I think her belly had swollen up a bit more from the gas inside, but that was it. The cool, dry room had preserved her well. Hopefully, enough that I could get the proof I needed.

There was a set of coroner’s tools on a tray nearby. I had not exactly done this sort of thing before, but I figured the hammer, chisel and scalpel would be all I needed. I pulled on the nearby set of gloves to keep my own fighting gloves clean and then grabbed the scalpel. I was halfway through removing her scalp when the priest came down with a lantern in hand.

“What in _God’s name_ are you doing, boy?!”

“I think you were right about Diana already being dead when she was bit,” I said. I was talking without thinking, my fingers not pausing even once when the priest came down to the basement. “Nothing about the vampire attack and everything that’s happened since we came here makes sense in the context of a vampire attack. So, if it wasn’t a vampire, then what killed Diana O’Hara? Who else was there that night?”  

My scalpel finally finished tracing around her skull and met up with my initial incision. I set it aside and began gently pulling her scalp away from her skull.

“There were her daughters, but they had already been bitten and the rest of the family would have been watching them for trouble. Plus, Phillip O’Hara definitely said that the door was broken down from the outside. He, Diana and Rikard opened fire on that side of the room.”

The chisel tapped a delicate line of cracks around the bloody white of her skull. Very slowly, I separated the crown from the rest of the bone.

“So, something came through that door. But after that, his testimony broke down. He said he couldn’t remember anything, couldn’t even remember what it had looked like. But O’Hara was focused on that door when he opened fire and I saw that bastard vampire when he ripped open my guts. It looked like a fucking nightmare. How’d he forget that? And Rikard said he couldn’t remember anything either. I could buy one person losing some memories when they get knocked out, but both of them at the same event? No.”

The bone came loose with a quiet little squelching sound. I gently set it on the tool tray away from the instruments and started looking over Mrs. Ohara’s brain.

“And Mrs. O’Hara dies, but not from a vampire bite. She hasn’t risen and with the way half the town’s gone missing – “

“What?!”

“ – oh, forgot to knock on your door earlier, sorry, but if someone’s gathering up all that manpower, why would they have left her out of it? There’s no good reason. Not unless they _couldn’t_ , not if she really was dead before being bitten.”

And there it was.

I didn’t know much biology, but I knew that veins and arteries were supposed to carry blood to and from the heart, which meant they had to be sealed. The big purple tube running along the outer surface of her brain had a break in it. Even worse, the tissue around the break was dark with dried blood.

_‘God damn, why’d I have to be right?’_

“This is an aneurism,” the priest whispered.

“Yeah, it is,” I said tiredly. “You really should clear out of town quick, because things aren’t going to be great tonight.”

 

* * *

 

I got back to the well with a few minutes to spare. I’d taken the time to help the priest make Mrs. O’Hara close to whole again before leaving. It was probably not going to come to anything, since I was likely to die tonight, but I’d been the one to carve her head open, so I felt like I should put her back together again.

“It’s not a vampire that’s the problem,” I said.

D looked up at me from beneath his wide-brimmed hat.

The last rays of the sun were starting to set behind the trees.

“Mrs. O’Hara died of an aneurism and I think it was Rikard who caused it,” I continued.

“Explain,” was the only thing D said.

I took a deep breath, trying to order my thoughts, trying to make sense of everything. I had only some of the pieces, but what I did have fit. It _felt_ right, more than just a random vampire attack and nothing but coincidence afterwards.

“Rikard is the one controlling the vampire. Maybe it tried to ensorcell him instead of biting him and it backfired or maybe Rikard just took over its mind outright, but he’s the one directing it. It bit Diana O’Hara to make it look like its bite killed her, but it vomited the blood back up right afterwards. Then it left Rikard and Phillip O’Hara alone because it had to, because Rikard ordered it to, but it couldn’t leave the girls. The only way anyone would buy a vampire breaking into a house to get them and then not draining them dry would be if the vampire died, and Rikard couldn’t have that. So it bite them again and left them comatose, then went away. Rikard muddled his father’s mind a bit, probably his own too, and then played possum.”

“What are you basing this off of? Bitterness?” Was he actually mocking me for getting brainwashed?

“No. When you examined the O’Haras, you didn’t see anything strange about the men, did you? Coming from you, I take that to mean they weren’t the slightest bit suspicious. I mean, any other Hunter might have missed something, but _you_? No, they weren’t bitten, weren’t enthralled. I thought he was after he attacked me, but now I think that it was just his decision. And the way the whole town just doesn’t give a fuck about this? Not normal. A vampire could only control a person they’ve gotten their hooks into. A telepath would just need to reach out. And when I went back to their house a little while ago, I found someone had made medicine in Rikard’s room. Not something for a specific illness, just something to cover general pain and breathing trouble. Something Rikard would have.”

“Your theory has several holes in it. Motive, for one,” D said, but I thought I heard a contemplative tone in his voice. It wasn’t impossible, just very improbable.

“Yeah, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I don’t know why he would have killed his mother, or sicked a vampire on his sisters and town. Not sure where he took his dad, or if old man O’Hara is in on it, though I doubt it because he did hire you. Not sure how a teenager could have overpowered the mind of vampire.”

“It’s rather a moot point right now, anyway,” D said calmly. The last glow of the sun had disappeared from the horizon and night was falling. I didn’t think it was that which had made D say it didn’t matter, though. Nor was it the reason he stood up and put his right hand on his blade’s handle.

No, I was pretty sure the reason for that was the sudden scuffling, crumbling sound of dirt being pushed out of the way. Like, say, a large group of bodies all rising from the earth at the same time.

I had forgotten to check beneath the houses, hadn’t I? God damn it, that’s what I got for rushing it.

I could hear frightened murmurs from the people inside their homes, some ancient instinct in their souls knowing that danger was coming even if they did not have the same level of awareness that D and I had to know where it was coming from. I wondered how many would still remain after tonight was over. Probably not many.

Still, I thought, as I pulled my fighting gloves higher up onto my hands, I’d survived one all-out brawl with a bunch of super powered monsters before. Another one was not a terribly big deal, right?

Yeah, that was a lie.

 

  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't say I'm happy with how this turned out. I think I strayed from this story too long. I'm probably going to come back and give a re-write in the next few days, see if I can't make the pacing flow a bit better since it feels rushed.


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